Abstract

The point of the traditional distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification is to insist on the normative character of epistemology. The point is not to dismiss from epistemology merely the genesis of ideas; into the context of discovery go also descriptions of evaluative practices and decisions. However ideas are created, scrutinized, and judged, it is only the approbation to which they are entitled, accorded or not, that allegedly matters to epistemology. The criticism, familiar since N.R. Hanson's Patterns of Discovery, that philosophy ought not to ignore the genesis of ideas is ironically conservative. If what is not normative epistemology is to be ignored, then the distinction would have us ignore even the reception and appraisal of scientific ideas.