INTRODUCTION

Science is often said to be a search for truth, a quest aiming at the formation of true beliefs about our world – beliefs concerning particular facts was well as general laws that may connect them.

But however appealing this conception may seem, it has, first of all, fundamental logical flaws, and second, it fails to do justice to a group of considerations that govern the critical appraisal and the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses and theories in science.

I propose briefly to elaborate this claim and to suggest an alternative way of characterizing science as a goal-directed endeavor.

The following considerations are informed both by the ideas of logical empiricism and by the more recent methodological explorations in a pragmatic-sociological vein undertaken by Thomas Kuhn and by kindred thinkers.

SCIENTIFIC THEORIZING: INVENTION AND CRITICAL APPRAISAL

Scientific theories are introduced in an effort to bring order into the diversity of the phenomena we encounter in our experience. How are such theories arrived at, and how are they supported?

Devising of effective theories is not a matter governed by systematic rules of discovery. As Einstein was fond of saying, scientific hypotheses and theories are arrived at by free invention, by the exercise of a creative scientific imagination. But their actual acceptance in science is subject to a critical evaluation by reference to the results of experimental or observational tests and to certain important additional criteria, which will be considered shortly.