One of the difficulties is that not much has been said that gets at
the nebulous, elusive, intuitive, Creative, gestating, formative, uncertain,
ill-structured, pre-scientific early stages in part because not much is
known in any precise or validated way.  Whatever may be known, experienced
or suspected would be in widely scattered sources under other headings and
not generally or fully treated in works concerned with inguiry as such.
Especially since people who make it their main business to write about re-
search are likely to be concerned with the acceptability and verification
of what they write, one would expect the coverage to be more generous on
matters that are better established.

A second difficulty, one that too often goes unnoticed, is that so-called
problems are mental constructs that commonly have no empirical referents.
Even to add that problems are as they are perceived only increases rather
than reduces the difficulty. For Gertrude Stein, famed poetess, it may be
that a rose is a rose is a rose. For people concerned with inguiry on many
levels, however, the term embraces a variety of meanings and connotations
that reguire sorting out. As one example, the use of the term in common
parlance and by an investigator working at the front edge of a given disci-
pline need not be the same. As another, it is common for a newcomer to confuse
an intellectual itch about an ill-defined problem area with a well-defined
research problem. In both examples, what one takes to be known, the character
of the problem, may get in the way of what needs to be known for the purpose
of research.

Common to both examples above is that problems are as they are perceived
and as one elects to define them for general purposes or for the purpose at

hand. Clearly, if the factory lights go out and production cannot proceed,

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