#context of justification

[processes]

Kekulé's dream figure: Kekulé's proposal for the structure of benzene (1872)

The German organic chemist August Kekulé described the eureka moment when he realized the structure of benzene.[18]

I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

(source: wiki)

[geopolicraticus]

Contexts of Discovery and Contexts of Justification

Historical Discovery and Justification.—Reichenbach maintained that, “Once a result of thinking is obtained, we can reorder our thoughts in a cogent way, constructing a chain of thoughts between point of departure and point of arrival; it is this rational reconstruction of thinking that is controlled by logic, and whose analysis reveals those rules which we call logical laws.” Is this true for historical thinking as well? The problem of distinguishing context of discovery from context of justification in history is compounded by the many forms of discovery and justification that may be involved in the formation of historical knowledge. We recognize that there is an order of discovery for the individual, an ontogenic order of discovery, as it were, distinct both from the phylogenic order of discovery and the order of justification. Moreover, the order of justification can vary according to the logic and the premisses adopted for the exposition, and as well according to the purpose of the exposition. A history written for grammar school children will differ substantially from a history written for a scholarly audience. With multiple orders of discovery and multiple orders of exposition, the epistemic landscape of historical knowledge is not a linear path from discovery to justification, not a single rational reconstruction reducible to a single methodology, but rather a set of choices that takes us through an itinerary of the past, and there are many such sets of choices. An historical methodology in this context is a coherent set of choices that take us through the branching paths of discoveries and justifications, and this is not itself a history. It could be called metahistory had that not already been given another use.