namely, man’s knowledge of the phenomenal order of nature, be constantly united in men’s minds with that which is certain to decay, namely, the theoretical formulation of special knowledge in more or less completely unified systems of doctrine?
I understand our author’s volume to be in the main an answer to this question. To be sure, the compact and manifold teachings which this text contains relate to a great many different special issues. A student interested in the problems of the philosophy of mathematics, or in the theory of probabilities, or in the nature and office of mathematical physics, or in still other problems belonging to the wide field here discussed, may find what he wants here and there in the text, even in case the general issues which give the volume its unity mean little to him, or even if he differs from the author’s views regarding the principal issues of the book. But in the main, this volume must be regarded as what its title indicates—a critique of the nature and place of hypothesis in the work of science and a study of the logical relations of theory and fact. The result of the book is a substantial justification of the scientific utility of theoretical construction—an abandonment of dogma, but a vindication of the rights of the constructive reason.
III
The most notable of the results of our author’s investigation of the logic of scientific theories relates, as I understand his work, to a topic which the present state of logical investigation, just summarized, makes especially important, but which has thus far been very inadequately treated in the text-books of inductive logic. The useful hypotheses of science are of two kinds:
1. The hypotheses which are valuable precisely because they are either verifiable or else refutable through a definite appeal to the tests furnished by experience; and
2. The hypotheses which, despite the fact that experience suggests them, are valuable despite, or even because, of the fact that experience can neither confirm nor refute them. The contrast between these two kinds of hypotheses is a prominent topic of our author’s discussion.
Hypotheses of the general type which I have here placed first
