When August Kekulé, a professor of chemistry from Ghent, nodded in his office in 1861, he saw dancing carbon and hydrogen atoms and the Ouroboros, a mythical serpent bending in a circle and biting its own tail. The dream, or so Kekulé claimed, gave him crucial insight into the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule—one of the great achievements in the history of organic chemistry.
This anecdote was more common than it is now, but you may remember it from your chemistry class. It can be considered a typical story of a scientific idea. Other mythical tales are somewhat comparable: Archimedes of Syracuse, who makes a bathtub overflow (“Eureka!”) or Isaac Newton, who sees an apple fall. But what makes Kekulé’s story so interesting is that it takes place in a world of dreams, fantasy, and the fantastic. The dream of a snake has nothing to do with the practice of chemical experiments.
You can also have spontaneous ideas, without bathtubs, apples, or dreams. There is an old saying in the philosophical theory of science that it can be enough simply to drink a particularly good cup of coffee in the morning or to shave absentmindedly. The point of getting science out of an idea isn’t having it in the first place, it’s trying to explain why something exists for that idea.
Origin and validity
According to the influential philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), a distinction is made between the so-called context of discovery and the context of justification of a theory. They have nothing to do with the other according to the classical concept: you somehow came up with a theory, even if it was in a dream – justifying its validity is something completely different. In order to verify whether the benzene annular formation thesis is defensible, one does not attempt to reproduce the sleep state of Kikuli in the hope of the appearance of Ouroboros again. Instead, one justifies from the already existing knowledge of chemistry how the loop might work. Or you can use an X-ray diffractometer, for example, to “examine” experimentally.
Since about 1930, philosophy of science has paid intense attention to the difference between the context of discovery and the context of justification, among others in order to more precisely define its subject area. As a general rule, it is assumed that there are no rules for discovering theories and that there are no methodological requirements: it is a messy and unethical process, so to speak, and a theory should never be judged on the accuracy of its discovery. On the other hand, there are systematic regulations to justify theories – for example the rules by which mathematical proofs are carried out, or the various propositions of criteria against which competing theoretical interpretations of empirical measurements in the natural sciences should be compared.
In general, in philosophy – even outside the philosophy of science – one speaks of composition and validity rather than the context of discovery and justification. In the case of philosophical knowledge, as with other scientific theories, it is often possible to distinguish between the way in which it appeared and the way in which it was founded. However, the idea that composition plays no role at all and that it is merely a matter of justification and validity is not in dispute. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) criticism of health-based concepts of morality is a well-known criticism. For him, simply put, the value of a moral judgment is determined by its upbringing: by what kind of person came this judgment, in what way and with what historical background.
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