Scientific discovery is a key topic in the philosophy of science. During the 18th and 19th centuries, different elements of discovery gradually became separated and discussed in greater detail: the nature of observations and experiments; the act of having an insight; and the processes involved in articulating, developing and testing that novel insight. Philosophical discussion focused on whether or not rules could be devised to guide these different aspects of the process.
One response to the demarcation criterion was that scientific discoveries are logical processes after all, and so they deserve a proper philosophical treatment. Advocates of this approach generally agree that it is impossible to put together a manual that provides a formal mechanical procedure through which innovative concepts or hypotheses can be derived: There is no discovery machine. But they disagree on the extent to which the process of conceiving theories is, or can be, non-analyzable: A mysterious guess, a hunch or more or less instantaneous and random process (Whewell 1996).
Other approaches to the logic of discovery are more concerned with describing and explicating the actual procedures scientists engage in when devising new ideas. These methodologies are typically informed by the insights of evolutionary biology, and they conceive of the generation of new ideas as an iterative process of variation and selection. In addition, they often employ heuristic strategies that are neither purely subjective nor algorithmic or formullizable but rather open to reasonable rationalization and argument. As philosophers of science have become more attuned to actual scientific practices, interest in these heuristic models has increased.
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