Scientific discovery is the process of uncovering novel insights about nature. These insights are then incorporated into scientific theory and used to explain new phenomena in a variety of disciplines. In the 19th century, William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences became an important point of orientation for philosophical discussion about discovery because it separated the “having of a happy thought” (or eureka moment) from processes such as articulating, developing and testing a new theory. The resulting discussions focused on whether or how such separate processes could be guided by rules.
In recent decades, however, the treatment of discovery by philosophers has been transformed. As philosophers have become more attuned to actual scientific practices, there has been a renewed interest in the cognitive mechanisms that generate new ideas and concepts. Some of this research focuses on the ways scientists use models to represent reality, while others explore how the propositional imagination plays an important role in the construction and articulation of heuristic hypotheses.
A few of these approaches, most notably Norwood Hanson’s, argue that the process of conceiving new ideas follows a special logic that is distinct from inductive and deductive reasoning. Proponents of this view acknowledge that it is impossible to construct a manual that provides a rational way through which innovative concepts or hypotheses can be developed, but they nevertheless maintain that the process does have a distinctive logic and that the topic of discovery is thus a valid one for philosophical inquiry.
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