Judgment in Science and in Philosophy of Science

The concept of scientific judgment has been constantly gaining currency in the philosophy of science. Though not yet so current as to have found its way into the main metascientific topics of Current Research in Philosophy of Science (Asquith and Kyburg 1978), the neglect is hardly surprising since the inclusion (to use Kant's beginning words in the Prolegomena) “must wait till those who endeavor to draw from the fountain of reason itself have completed their work; it will then be the turn of these [collections] to inform the world of what has been done” (Kant 1950, 3). Among those who are presently endeavoring “to draw from the fountain of reason” are Marx Wartofsky (1978), who regards the concept of judgment to be the key to the understanding of scientific discovery and creativity; Thomas Kuhn (1977), who regards it as essential in the process of theory choice; Harold Brown (1977, 145–51), for whom judgment is the central feature of scientific rationality; Thomas Nickles (1980, 39, 43–44), who takes it to be one of the main points of the transition from logicality to rationality; the present author (1977a, 95–96), for whom judgment is the positive, constructive, and defensible side of Feyerabend's move from method to anarchism; Joseph Weizenbaum (1976), whose critique of computer technology suggests a move from calculation to judgment; and Gerald Holton (1973; 1978), whose thematic analysis of scientific thought will be seen below to be intimately related to judgmental analysis.