188 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



The principle to be kept in mind in such a classification is 

 that the techniques which are highly determinate are to be 

 grouped under the techniques of construction, while those 

 which are less highly determinate belong under the tech- 

 niques of hypothesis-formation. The reason for this is the 

 fact that the highly determinate operations permit one to 

 extract the explanatory entity, so to speak, from the data; 

 the inferential movement is simply an elaboration of what is 

 already given; the suppositional entity is, in a sense, de- 

 manded by the data and hence may be read out of them. Its 

 content may, therefore, be determined more or less com- 

 pletely by the data, and there is little room for the free play 

 of the imagination. It is important to note, however, that 

 constructs obtained in this way are often enlarged through 

 the method of hypothesis. Abstractions, for example, are 

 readily definable in terms of the data from which they have 

 been derived; but entities thus defined are frequently aug- 

 mented by acts of imagination in such a way as to permit 

 their use as strict hypotheses. Hence to say that the method 

 of abstraction is a method of construction is not to deny that 

 it may also be a method of hypothesis-formation. In the 

 same way, wholes and parts are not readily definable in 

 terms of their respective parts and wholes and therefore 

 afford a wide range for the free play of imagination; hence 

 synthesis and analysis are properly to be classed as opera- 

 tions of hypothesis-formation. But there are clearly some 

 ways in which parts and wholes are interrelated, hence 

 there is a minimal logic of synthesis and analysis. It follows 

 that the classification of these methods as operations of 

 hypothesis-formation is not a denial of their possible con- 

 sideration also as operations of construction. The best that 

 one can do, therefore, is to construct a scale of discovery 

 techniques, indicating that those at one end of the scale are 

 essentially methods of construction and those at the other 

 end are essentially methods of hypothesis-formation. 



It is likely that all such techniques are based ultimately 

 upon analogy. One can anticipate the unknown only if he 



