Not all philosophers of science agreed. Hanson, for example, articulated a logic of discovery involving abductive inferences from anomalous data to new hypotheses designed to account for them (Hanson 1958). Others focused on methodologies of discovery that could either allow one to rationally reconstruct why something was discoverable at a given time (Nickels 1985) or to explain why a new hypothesis is considered promising and worthy of further investigation (Schaffner 1993). Early contributions to the new mechanical philosophy followed this path and characterized investigative strategies scientists use to discover mechanisms (see the entry on   scientific discovery).