re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition sasghm theseus unx sas com gary merrill writes ted marvin dgbt doc ca ted grusec writes gary by extra scientific i did not mean to imply that hypothesis generation was not in most cases extremely closely tied to the state of knowledge within a scientific area i meant was that there was no scientific logic involved in the process it is inductive not deductive i am further puzzled by the proposed distinction between scientific logic and inductive logic at this point i don t have a clue what you mean by extra scientific unless you mean that at some times someone seems to come up with an idea that we can t trace to prior theories concepts knowledge etc this is a fairly common observation but just for grins i d like to see some genuine examples ok just for grins kekule hypothesized a resonant structure for the aromatic benzene ring after waking from a dream in which a snake was swallowing his tail archimedes formalized the principle of buoyancy while meditating in his bath in neither case was there no connection to prior theories concepts etc as you stipulated above what there was was an intuitive leap beyond the current way of thinking to develop ideas which subsequently proved to have predictive power e g they stood the test of experimental verification pardon my kibbutzing tom
