Almost every success in scientific inquiry involves a process of discovery. The question is, what exactly is the nature of this discovery process? This issue of Topoi attempts to address this question from both a theoretical and a practical viewpoint. Its papers offer an analysis of the theories about inferential ways of accounting for scientific discoveries as well as some case studies of heuristic procedures for discovering ‘in vivo’ in several scientific fields.
Some philosophers argue that there is no way to explain the process of discovery through inferential reasoning, and that a new theory emerges out of the blue and seems like an utterly natural result. They call this the black box approach and they employ notions such as (Romantic) genius, insight or intuition to account for the process of discovery.
On the other hand, some philosophers claim that there are logically inferential paths to scientific discovery. This view calls for a distinction between justification procedures, which are involved in the process of generating a new theory and justification procedures that are involved in testing it. The former are referred to as generative justification and the latter as consequential justification.
Philosophers who take this position are often concerned with clarifying these different contexts of discovery by means of models. They also build computer programs that heuristically select hypotheses from a knowledge base to solve particular scientific puzzles, and they try to identify what features these heuristic procedures typically possess in terms of predictive power, simplicity, and “consilience” with existing theory. This is the approach that has motivated some of the research on creativity at the intersection of philosophy of science and cognitive science.
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