Scientific Discovery as a Topic for Philosophy of Science: Some Personal Reflections
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Scientific Discovery as a Topic for Philosophy of Science: Some Personal Reflections Tom Nickles1,2
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract This is a brief, personal retrospective on developments in the treatment of scientific discovery by philosophers, since about 1970. Keywords Context of discovery/justification · Logic of discovery · Rationality of discovery · Computer discovery · Heuristics · Problem reduction · Theory reduction
1 The Occasion It is forty years since the first Leonard Conference in Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1978. The conference produced two Boston Studies volumes, Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality and Scientific Discovery: Case Studies (Nickles 1980a, b). Noticing this, the organizer and primary editor of this special issue, Emiliano Ippoliti, invited me to reflect on developments over these four decades. I am now old enough to throw in a fifth decade, for context!
2 Some Personal History I had been interested in heuristics and in major scientific change since grad school in the 1960s. The primary case study of my doctoral thesis was the transition from classical (statistical) mechanics to the early quantum theory, helped by guiding heuristics such as Ehrenfest’s adiabatic principle and Bohr’s correspondence principle. A few years later, scientific papers by Einstein, Ehrenfest, and Debye, and historical work by Martin Klein and Thomas Kuhn (especially Kuhn 1962/1970; Klein 1970; and work that eventually fed into Kuhn 1987) led me to the conclusion that problem reduction—the reduction or transformation of * Tom Nickles [email protected] 1
University of Nevada (emeritus), Reno, NV 89557, USA
Present Address: Reno, NV, USA
2
unsolved problems into ones that had been solved or at least partially solved—is at least as important in ongoing research as theory reduction, which had dominated philosophical discussion. Herbert Simon’s view that research is mainly problem solving, and Kuhn’s emphasis on the role of puzzle solving in normal research—his “exemplars”—were among the influences. I concluded that problems needed more study as units of and for analysis. My main contribution to the reduction issues was to argue that intertheory and interproblem relations need not be strictly logical. They might involve operations such as limit-taking, generalization, and specialization.1 Many excellent technical thinkers have developed the topic of intertheory/intermodel relations much further than I did, or could. Examples are Batterman (2001) and authors in Falkenberg and Morrison (2015). The Leonard Conference itself was made possible by donations in memory of our student, Guy Leonard, who had died in an auto accident. Our budget was small—initially only $5000., but we piggy-backed on the PSA meetings in San Francisco. The fact that dozens of philosophers, historians, and sociologists from six countries were willing to come for little or nothing signaled that there was much interest in the long-neglected, even forbidden, to
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