Heuristics and Human Judgment: What We Can Learn About Scientific Discovery from the Study of Engineering Design
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Heuristics and Human Judgment: What We Can Learn About Scientific Discovery from the Study of Engineering Design Mark Thomas Young1
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based rea‑ soning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particu‑ lar, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering prac‑ tices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery. Keywords Engineering design · Heuristics · Scientific discovery · Intuition · Skill · Judgment · Scientific discovery machines Scientists in a particular field are not all one and the same; they possess different temperaments and abilities that reflect differences in education and practical experience. Yet in their analyses of scientific methodology, philosophers have long perceived a tension between individual epistemic abil‑ ities and the application of rule based reasoning. This is apparent among even the earliest expressions of a scientific method. Francis Bacon, for example, proposed a method‑ ology for scientific discovery that was explicitly designed to preclude the possibility of utilising the epistemological advantages of natural or acquired talent.1 Likewise, William Whewell promoted an inductive account of discovery where ‘practical skill and practical experience….lead to science as occasions only, and do not form part of science…science begins then only when we look at the facts from a general point of view’ (Whewell 1860, p. 244).
* Mark Thomas Young [email protected] https://uib.academia.edu/MarkThomasYoung 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Sydnesplassen 12‑13, Postboks 7805, 5020 Bergen, Norway
Yet despite the best efforts of such figures to popularize the idea of a method for scientific discovery which supplants a reliance on individual skills with routinized epistemic pro‑ cedures, by the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Karl Popper still felt the need to present their analyses of science as aiming to ‘save the sciences and philosophy from narrow specialization and an ob
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