Scientific discovery involves uncovering new knowledge about the natural world through observation, experimentation and analysis. Scientific discoveries have profoundly shaped human understanding of the world and driven technological advances that drastically changed economies, societies and cultures across the globe. Scientific discovery has also often been a source of political and religious conflict, such as when Copernicus challenged geocentric models of the universe or Joseph Priestley identified a new type of gas (Kuhn 1970).
In the 19th century, a number of philosophers of science developed philosophies of scientific discovery. These accounts sought to separate the act of having a novel insight, the so-called eureka moment, from processes involved in articulating, developing and testing this insight. They argued that traditional logic, as well as the notion of a creative leap, misrepresents the process by which new ideas are generated.
In the early 21st century, interest in these approaches reemerged as philosophical studies of scientific inquiry became more attuned to actual scientific practices. This led to a variety of responses that offer different ways to study the logic of scientific discovery. These range from purely conceptual analyses of reasoning strategies to empirical work on creativity drawing on resources as diverse as cognitive science, psychology and sociology. Nevertheless, all of these responses share the assumption that there is more to scientific discovery than the creative leap that we associate with the eureka moment. Instead, these theories of scientific discovery conceive of it as an analyzable reasoning process that includes the creative thought, its articulation and development, and the scientific community’s adjudication of what counts as a discovery.
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