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Scientific Discovery Reloaded Emiliano Ippoliti1

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017

Abstract The way scientific discovery has been conceptualized has changed drastically in the last few decades: its relation to logic, inference, methods, and evolution has been deeply reloaded. The ‘philosophical matrix’ moulded by logical empiricism and analytical tradition has been challenged by the ‘friends of discovery’, who opened up the way to a rational investigation of discovery. This has produced not only new theories of discovery (like the deductive, cognitive, and evolutionary), but also new ways of practicing it in a rational and more systematic way. Ampliative rules, methods, heuristic procedures and even a logic of discovery have been investigated, extracted, reconstructed and refined. The outcome is a ‘scientific discovery revolution’: not only a new way of looking at discovery, but also a construction of tools that can guide us to discover something new. This is a very important contribution of philosophy of science to science, as it puts the former in a position not only to interpret what scientists do, but also to provide and improve tools that they can employ in their activity. Keywords  Logic · Discovery · Heuristics · Reasoning · Psychology · Algorithm

1 Scientific Discovery: The Matrix A long-standing and influential tradition has shaped the way scientific discovery has been accounted for. It has been put forward in particular by logical empiricism, mathematical logic and the analytical tradition in philosophy, which moulded the matrix, that is, the origin and the conceptual framework, of the received theory of scientific discovery. It simply maintains that there is no way of accounting for scientific discovery in logical or even rational terms: “there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. […] every discovery contains an ‘irrational element,’ or ‘a creative intuition,’ in Bergson’s sense” (Popper 1961, 32). This idea, which opens up the way to the ‘psychology of discovery’, breaks down into two approaches. The first argues that scientific discovery is a black box: the final hypothesis is the only thing that we can see, and this is the outcome of a subjective, idiosyncratic, completely personal process and, as such, it cannot be reconstructed by rational means: “there are extraordinary aspects of the person who is able to produce significant new works” (Weisberg * Emiliano Ippoliti [email protected] 1



Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

2006, xii), and they are essential for discovery. Genius (see e.g. Murray 1989), illumination, ‘faculties’ such as intuition, insight, or ‘divergent thinking’, are common notions employed to support this thesis. Even if this line of argument ends up with a obscurum per obscurius, in principle that is not a problem: the whole process of discovery does not matter so much since what philosophy and science can reasonably do is evaluate a hypothesis only after i