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This is a book that has been badly needed in this country for many years. The dominant tradition, systematically challenged only by the little-known logician Whewell in the nineteenth century, has assumed that scientists go about collecting data, make generalizations on the basis of similarities in the data, and then knit these generalizations together into theories. In this book the author, who owes much to Prof. Popper, whose Logik der Forschung has not yet been translated into English, denies that scientists make generalizations or inductions in this way. With a wealth of examples drawn from the history of science he shows that facts are always collected in the light of some hypothesis which the scientist tries to confirm or falsify by the collecting of facts. He then tries to reformulate the traditional problems about induction and probability so that they can feature in his account of the hypothetico-deductive method of science.
Part 1 will prove most useful to those who are interested in general questions about the methods of science without being well versed in the traditional arguments about induction and probability. The nature of hypothesis and experimentation is examined, and problems connected with testability, determinism, simplicity, and the use of operational definition are considered. Particular attention is paid to the peculiarities of non-instantial hypotheses—i.e. generalizations occurring in theories which have no observable instances—which, the author claims, cannot be fitted into the usual inductivist account of scientific method. Part 2 conforms to the author's description of the book in the preface as 'largely a critical survey of the views of scientific inference that have been developed over the last thirty years or so, from the time at the end of World War I when the late Lord Keynes and Professor C. D. Broad broke new ground'. The traditional criteria of causal determination suggested by Mill and Keynes are discussed and reformulat