Fred Suppe claims that the refereed journal article is an appropriate unit of scientific debate for philosophical analysis. He also claims that when we regiment scientific papers correctly, we can see that the hypothetico-deductive method, Baysian induction, and inference to the best explanation fail to capture the structure of scientific articles adequately. In what follows I demonstrate that the coding scheme Suppe used for uncovering the structure of a scientific paper is not appropriate under all circumstances, illustrate alternative structures found (...) in various scientific articles, and show that the hypothetico-deductive method can accommodate the alternative structures I find. My conclusions are that the article that Suppe analyzed is not paradigmatic of published scientific articles, that different papers have different structures, that the structure depends upon the rhetorical goals of the article, and that, because of the different structures and different goals, no one philosophical account of testing is going to suffice. (shrink)

Scientists generally record their laboratory activities and experimental results in notebooks, from which they construct scientific papers. The Johns Hopkins physiologist William Henry Howell kept a laboratory notebook from 1913 to 1914, in which he recorded experiments on the blood clotting factor prothrombin. In 1914 he published a paper using this notebook, to justify his theory of prothrombin activation. Howell's paper is reconstructed, in terms of its narrative and argument elements, from the laboratory activities and experimental results recorded in the (...) notebook. This reconstruction reveals an intimate connection between the two texts and the process by which Howell constructed a scientific paper. The generation of scientific knowledge by Howell is then evaluated, especially in terms of theory formation and justification. (shrink)