FEYNMAN DIAGRAMS AND THE LOGIC OF DISCOVERY

Glenn Statile

 (1)   THE PROBLEM OF DISCOVERY

From the perspective of technical progress the logic of discovery has long been a thorn in the side of the philosophy of science, yet it somehow manages to retain its fascination for those of us who nevertheless admit the unlikelihood of ever deciphering the workings of the unbridled imagination.   No less a figure than Karl Popper once declared discovery as not susceptible to logical analysis.  This led other toilers in the vineyard of discovery, for example Hans Reichenbach, to distinguish between contexts of justification and discovery. But as we all know, justification by means of a rational reconstruction involving some ex post facto line of reasoning is but a sad impostor for the assumption of a discernible pattern to discovery whose logic we continue to beg.  Yet when it comes to the defense of a logic of discovery the philosophical ranks have never been completely thinned. One such advocate, namely Norwood Russell Hanson, maintained that it was important to “attend as much to how scientific hypotheses are caught, as to how they are cooked.”[i]    In recent years interest in the logic of discovery has gravitated toward the discipline of cognitive science.