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Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein are exemplars of the fundamental investigator referred to in the grand manner as philosopher-scientist. Their philosophical and scientific thoughts were linked and their interest in fundamental issues led them to probe the process of thinking itself. The quotations in the epigraphs to this chapter and to the Introduction bespeak their commitment to this connection as a guiding theme in their scientific research. This Ariadne's thread is best thrown into perspective through the realization that their individual philosophies of science are composed of an epistemology of the origin of knowledge and an epistemology of scientific theories. In fact, the case of Poincaré and Einstein indicates that it is necessary—and, in my opinion, revealing of the structure of scientific theories—to separate the broad discipline of epistemology into two parts: (1) the construction of prescientific knowledge, that is, the origins of knowledge, which may be referred to as theory of knowledge; and (2) the relations of the scientist's knowledge of the world of perceptions to the structure of a scientific theory and the study of what a scientific theory is, hereinafter to be referred to as epistemology or scientific epistemology.¹ Both aspects of epistemology include an analysis of concept formation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4684-0545-3_2

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