 | This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's work-in-progress page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. For guidance on developing this draft, see Wikipedia:So you made a userspace draft. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Scientific Discovery is the process of augmenting the knowledge of the scientific community. In the philosophy of science, discovery is widely considered[1] to be a realist word as it implies that what is added to the scientific corpus is a description of reality, rather than an empirically adequate, anti-realist invention. However, the word discovery is regularly used by realists and anti-realists alike to describe the process of finding out something unexpected and integrating it into science either by modifying a theory or creating a new theory. As a part of the philosophy of science, discovery had been dismissed by the logical positivism movement of the early twentieth century as impossible to rationalise, because it involved an "irrational element"[2]. N. R. Hanson's seminal work "Patterns of Discovery" (1958) influenced philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn to argue for a rational account of discovery. Philosophy of discovery has consequently grown as a discipline in the philosophical literature, but is still dwarfed by the traditional analysis of justification - the supposed other half of science[3].
History
editFootnotes
edit- ^ For example, see Kantorovich (1993, p. 13)
- ^ Popper 1959, p. 8
- ^ See Nickles (1978, pp. 8-22) for an in-depth discussion of the "discovery/justification" divide
References
edit- Kantorovich, Aharon (1993), Scientific discovery: logic and tinkering, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, ISBN 0791414779
- Nickles, Thomas (1978), "Introductory Essay: Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science", in Nickles, Thomas (ed.), Scientific Discovery, Logic and Rationality, London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, ISBN 9027710694
- Popper, Karl (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson & Co., ISBN 0090866304