Medawar, Peter Brian, @b[Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought],
Am. Phil. Soc., Phila., 1969.

Foreword by George W. Corner:
How do scientists' minds work as they try by observation, experiment,
and reflection to solve the problems set for them by Nature?  Is there
an established method of scientific thinking?  As Sir Peter Medawar
has pointed out in the following pages, few sceintists have attempted
to analyze their own thought processes.  They get on with their work
and arrive at their conclusions without deeply considering the mental
pathways they followed.  Those who have attemted to analyze the
scientists' method of thinking, from Fancis Bacon and John Stuart Mill
to 20th-century writers, have ostly not been scientific investigators
but philosophers and logicians.  Working scientisits have generally
regarded [such efforts] with indifference...

The author won a Nobel prize in 1960 in Medicine (for aging research)

Refers to:  Introduction a l'etude de la medecine experimentale, Paris,
	1865, by Calude Bernard
            Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer, by
	Francis Galton, Frotnightly Review, Aug. 1, 1872.

Chap 1: The Problem Stated

A scientist is a man who wieghs the earth and ascertains the
temperature of the sun; he destroys matter and invents new
forms of matter, and one day he will invent new forms of life.
But how has he achieved the understanding that makes this
possible?  What methods of enquiry apply with equal efficacy
to atoms and stars and genes?  What @b[is] "The Scientific Method"?
What goes on in the head when scientific discoveries are made?

Scientific papers in the form in which they are communicated to learned
journals are notorious for misrepresenting the processes of thought that
led to whatever discoveries they describe.  The scientist is not in
fact conscious of acting out a method.  
...Of course [this] is very poor evidence that no method exists.
[They] could be like the chap in Moliere who found that all his
life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

[Some problems that] are "formal" in the sense that they 
[are common to all sciences]:
	Validation:  Judge statement X to be T, F, probable (of degree p)
	Reducibility/emergence:  Reduce sociol. to biol. to chem & physics
	Causality:  Necessary connexion vs. deep explanatory understanding

Chap 2: Mainly about Induction

Induction... somehow empowers us to pass from statements expressing
particular "facts" to general statements which comprehend them.
These general statements (or laws or principles) must do more than
merely summarize the information contained in the simple and
particular statements out of which they were compounded: they must
add something, say more than that which has been said already --
for what would be the us eof a "Law of Nature" which merely 
authenticated or conferred respectability upon the phenomena already
known to obey it?  Inductive reasoning is @b[ampliative] in nature.
It expands our knowledge, or at all events our pretensions to
knowledge.
This is all very well, but the point to be made clear is that
induction, so concieved, cannot be a logically rigorous
process.  It cannot (as deduction can, if properly executed)
lead us with certainty to the truth...  If it could, then
all scientific research could be carried out in a
recumbent posture, witht he eyes half closed.

[Induction is founded upon the belief that] there is a grammar of
science, and the language of science can be parsed....
In the inductive view, it is the process of @b[getting] an idea
or formulating a general proposition that can be logically reasoned
out....  This concept of the inductive process must have arisen
out of a misleading formal analogy with @b[de]duction.

It is most unlikely that more than a tiny minority of mathematical
theorems were ever in fact arrived at, "discovered", merely by
the exercise of deductive reasoning.

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in
scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when
the curtain goes up and the public sees us.  TYhe thatrical illusion
is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes.  In real life
discovery and justification are almost always different processes,
and a sound methodology must make it clear that they are so.

Any adequate account of scientific method must include a theory
of incentive or special motive; must contain a canon to restrict
observation to something less thanthe whole universe of observables.
We cannot browse over the field of nature like cows in a pasture.

Theories are repaired more than they are refuted, and a
methodology of rectification (a logical variant of negative
feedback) is something we shall expect to find in any satisfactory
formal account of scientific reasoning.
Sometimes theories merely fade away... More often they are merely
assimilated into wider theories in which they rank as special
cases.
[Must] account of scientific fallibility...  Nearly all scientific
research leads nowhere -- or, if it does lead somewhere, then not
in the direction it started off with.  In retrospect we tend to
forget the errors, so that the "Scientific Method" appears very
much more powerful than it really is, particularly when it is presented
to the public in the terminology of breakthroughs, and to fellow
scientists with the studied hypocrisy expected of a contribution to
a learned journal.  .. 4/5 of my time has been wasted, and I believe
this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing
follow-the-leader in research.

4 kinds of experiments:
  1. Inductive, Baconian:  What if we contrive some sit. & watch Nature
  2. Deductive, Kantian:  Vary axioms of a formal sys, then interpret
  3. Critical, Galilean:  Do expt. to test consequences of hyp. H
  4. Demonstrative, Aristotelian: Illustrate a preconceived truth.

Chap 3: Mainly about Intuition

Hypothetico-deductive method: an exploratory dialogue between
2 voices or episodes of thought, imaginative and critical, which
alternate and interact.

The process by which we form a hypothesis is not illogical but
non-logical, i.e. outside logic.  But once we have formed an
opinion we can expose it to criticism, usually by experimentation.

Intuition:  all types arise suddenly, wholly, unpremeditated.
  1. Deductive:  see at once what logically follows from X.
	Deduction owes its existence to the infirmity of our powers
	of reasoning: it cannot bring us any news of the world, but
	(because our minds are indeed imperfect) it can bring us
	awareness.
  2. Inductive: synthesize a new hyp. from which X will follow
  3. Wit:  instantaeous apprehension of analogy (structural simil)
  4. Experimental flair: think up good expts. to perform to test X

That "creativity" is beyond analysis is a romantic illusion we
must now outgrow.