THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



He goes on to say that logic was developed to regulate debates in 

 the Greek schools, assemblies and law-courts. It was necessary to 

 determine which side won, and logic served this purpose, but it 

 should not occasion surprise that it is quite unsuitable in science, 

 for which it was never intended. Many logicians emphatically 

 declare that logic, interested in correctness and validity, has 

 nothing at all to do with productive thinking. 



Schiller goes even further in his criticism of traditional logic 

 and says that not only is it of little value in making new dis- 

 coveries, but that history has shown it to be of little value in 

 recognising their validity or ensuring their acceptance when they 

 have been proclaimed. Indeed, logical reasoning has often 

 prevented the acceptance of new truths, as is illustrated by the 

 persecution to which the great discoverers have so often been 

 subjected. 



" The slowness and difficulty with which the human race makes 

 discoveries and its blindness to the most obvious facts, if it 

 happens to be unprepared or unwilling to see them, should suffice 

 to show that there is something gravely wrong about the logician's 

 account of discovery." 



Schiller was protesting mainly against the view of the scientific 

 method expounded by certain logicians in the latter half of the 

 nineteenth century. Most modem philosophers concerning them- 

 selves with the scientific method do not interpret this phrase as 

 including the art of discovery, which they consider to be outside 

 their province. They are interested in the philosophical implica- 

 tions of science. 



Wilfred Trotter^* also had some provocative things to say 

 about the poor record which reason has in the advancement of 

 scientific knowledge. Not only has it few discoveries to its credit 

 compared to empiricism, he says, but often reason has obstructed 

 the advance of science owing to false doctrines based on it. In 

 medicine particularly, practices founded on reason alone have 

 often prevailed for years or centuries before someone with an 

 independent mind questioned them and in many cases showed 

 they were more harmful than beneficial. 



Logicians distinguish between inductive reasoning (from par- 

 ticular instances to general principles, from facts to theories) and 

 deductive reasoning (from the general to the particular, applying 



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