1. A good example of this trend is one of the best text books on scientific reasoning, Ronald Giere’s Understanding Scientific Reasoning. The first edition included an excellent example of how semi-formal inductive and deductive inferences must be pooled together to set up an argument for accepting or rejecting a theoretical hypothesis, given the results obtained from experiments and observations. However, the third volume is completely different: “I had reasons for dissatisfaction with this approach long before I conceived an alternative. From the students’ side, representing scientific reasoning in terms of simple argument forms seemed to me not to contribute much to their understanding of the scientific context. Reconstructing the reasoning as an explicit argument was often a burdensome, and frequently mechanical, exercise”. In the third edition the introductory chapters with deductive arguments have been completely eliminated — a change which “has made possible considerable simplification and streamlining of the whole text.” Ronald N. Giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Third edition, 1991, Preface, v. (First edition, 1979).
2. Meheus actually goes further than this by suggesting that her analysis of the reasoning of Clausius is not a rational reconstruction in Lakatos’s sense but ”an attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of the original texts, as accurately as possible Clausius’s reasoning process. Joke Meheus, “Adaptive Logic in Scientific Discovery: the Case of Clausius”, Logique et Analyse, 143–144, p. 360.
3. Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes”. In I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970, p. 91.
4. For the distinction between empirical and conceptual problems, see Larry Laudan, Progressv and Its Problems; Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977.
5. Peter Clark gives a detailed Lakatosian account of the rise of thermodynamics. As Meheus (note 6) observes, Clark’s is a reconstruction which builds on the notion that Clausius did not reason from inconsistency but first resolved it. This indeed is the case. However, she also suggests that this resolution was done “on the basis of non-logical grounds”. The crucial issue here is what non-logical grounds here means: identifying the inconsistency as an inconsistency involves using patterns of inference which can be explicated by help of formal argument schemas. But applying logic to identify inferences seems empty without reference to beliefs which have content. On the other hand beliefs without logical structure are blind. I shall return to this question below. See Peter Clark, “Atomism versus thermodynamics”, in: Colin Howson (ed.), Method and Appraisal in the Physical Sciences. The Critical Background to Modern Science 1800–1905. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, pp. 41–105.