What transforms a hypothesis into an accepted scientific belief is the
process of testing which was claimed to follow by the hypothetico-deductive
model of justification. This part of the scientists' activity was often
referred to as the "context of justification" and it is often distinguished
from the process by which the scientist formulates the hypothesis in the
first place, which is called the "context of discovery." Since only
the context of justification makes a hypothesis scientific,
only it is relevant to the philosophical account of the rational grounds
(or basis or "warrant") for scientific belief. Generally members of the
consensus tended to relegate the context of discovery to the personal,
and often idiosyncratic psychological factors which characterized
particular historical human scientists, accounts of which may be
psychologically or historically interesting, but which are irrelevant
to the philosophical account of how a hypothesis becomes a part
of science. The philosopher is interested only in the "logic" by
which a scientific belief comes to be warranted, not the psychological
or historical process which led to its formulation in the first
place. Thus the distinction between context of justification and context
of discovery was also an essential element of the empiricist consensus
in philosophy of science.