A NOTE ON ''THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD*' 



All this is commonplace and rather uninspiring. What is of 

 intense personal interest to many scientists is how an hypothesis 

 ever comes to be devised at all. Its creation is evidently a leap 

 upstream of the flow of deductive inference. One does not, as 

 writers of detective stories seem to imagine, deduce hypotheses; 

 quite the reverse, hypotheses are what we deduce things from. 

 It was at one time thought that hypotheses could be arrived at 

 by a rigorous logical process of ''induction'', but even that 

 humblest sort of hypothesis (for such it is), the simple collective 

 generalization, defied these efforts to make it logically respect- 

 able, and it defies them no less resolutely to-day. Philosophers 

 who now irritably contend that induction does not require 

 their formal blessing forget that it was they themselves or their 

 predecessors who first attempted the laying on of hands. Leav- 

 ing aside those forms of scientific enquiry that may be purely 

 documentary or descriptive in purpose — the determination of 

 an atomic weight, say, or the anatomy of a mollusc — it seems 

 that no attempt to solve a scientific problem can even be begun 

 without the subsidy of some hypothesis, however dimly formu- 

 lated or however vague. The first stage of textbook induction 

 as I learnt it used to be the assembly of 'relevant"* information; 

 but what could it be relevant to, if not to the terms of some 

 preconceived hypothesis? In my experience there is no stage in 

 the working out of a scientific problem in which some hypo- 

 thesis is not for the time being in office, and scientific activity 

 comes instantly to a standstill without this sort of direction of 

 its affairs. This, of course, says nothing about how hypotheses 

 come into being. So far as I can tell from my own experience 

 and from discussion with my colleagues, hypotheses are thought 

 up and not thought out. One simply ''has an idea** and has it 

 whole and suddenly, without a period of gestation in the 

 conscious mind. The creation an of hypothesis is akin to, and 

 just as obscure in origin as, any other creative act of mind. If 

 science were an art we should call it inspiration, but as only 



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