The Fall of Reichenbach

Reichenbach’s constraint is the methodological imperative formulated by Reichenbach in the following passage: “If we want to construct a philosophy of science, we have to distinguish carefully between two kinds of context in which scientific theories may be considered. The context of discovery is to be separated from the context of justification; the former belongs to the psychology of scientific discovery, the latter alone is to be the object of the logic of science.” Reichenbach’s constraint is usually understood as barring epistemological models from attempting rational reconstructions of discovery processes. This paper shows that Reichenbach’s constraint also bars epistemological models from capturing inquiry processes as genuine learning processes.