Reconnecting Logic with Discovery
- PDF / 738,192 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 199 Views
Reconnecting Logic with Discovery Carlo Cellucci1
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017
Abstract According to a view going back to Plato, the aim of philosophy is to acquire knowledge and there is a method to acquire knowledge, namely a method of discovery. In the last century, however, this view has been completely abandoned, the attempt to give a rational account of discovery has been given up, and logic has been disconnected from discovery. This paper outlines a way of reconnecting logic with discovery. Keywords Logic of discovery · Analytic method · Rules of discovery · Psychology of discovery · Heuristic
1 The Disconnection of Knowledge from Discovery According to a view going back to Plato, the aim of philosophy is to acquire knowledge and there is a method to acquire knowledge, namely a method of discovery (see Cellucci 2017a). In the last century, however, this view has been completely abandoned. Knowledge has been disconnected from discovery, the attempt to give a rational account of discovery has been given up, and discovery has been based on intuition, viewed as the gift of genius. Thus, Kuhn states that there are no “rules for inducing correct theories from facts,” indeed “theories, correct or incorrect,” are not “induced at all” (Kuhn 1977, 279). So there cannot be a “logic of discovery” but only a “psychology of research” (ibid., 266). A new theory “emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man,” and “what the nature of that final stage is—how an individual invents (or finds he has invented) a new way of giving order to data now assembled—must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so” (Kuhn 1996, 89–90). Theories are “imaginative posits, invented in one piece for application to nature” (Kuhn 1977, 279). Scientists experience their emergence as “a relatively sudden and unstructured event,” so they “often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ that ‘inundates’ * Carlo Cellucci [email protected] 1
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
a previously obscure puzzle” and “permits its solution” (Kuhn 1996, 122). Indeed, theories are born through “flashes of intuition,” and “though such intuitions depend upon the experience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the old” theories, “they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular items of that experience” (ibid., 123). They require the kind of “genius that leaps ahead of the facts, leaving the rather different talent of the experimentalist and instrumentalist to catch up” (Kuhn 1977, 194). But even “exploring the agreement between theory and experiment” requires of the experimentalists “the very best of their imagination, intuition, and vigilance” (ibid., 197). To base discovery on intuition, however, is an admission of impotence. Intuition is appealed to whenever one is unable to produce any other ground of knowledge. Moreover, intuition is and always will be hopelessly unreliable, being an unreasoned automatic response
Data Loading...
