The Antinomies of Serendipity How to Cognitively Frame Serendipity for Scientific Discoveries
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The Antinomies of Serendipity How to Cognitively Frame Serendipity for Scientific Discoveries Selene Arfini1 · Tommaso Bertolotti1 · Lorenzo Magnani1
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discovery, the philosophical literature has hardly paid attention to the cognitive significance of serendipity, accepting rather than examining some of its most specific features, such as its game-changing effect, the unexpectedness of its occurrence, and its affinity with the concept of “luck”. Thus, in this paper we aim at analyzing these characteristics in the light of their cognitive implications in the recognition, performance, and possible stimulation of serendipitous events in relation to scientific discoveries. Keywords Serendipity · Scientific discovery · Epistemic luck · Ignorance · Anticipation · Abduction
1 Introduction: The Three Pillars of Serendipity in Science Serendipity is a topic of growing fame in the panorama of sociology and philosophy of science. Despite its humble origins as a term ideated by Walpole (1789) in reference to “a silly fairy tale”, it has been used in the past 50 years to describe the unintentional, accidental, and lucky discoveries1 both in lay environments and in the scientific framework. In the latter category some game-changing events for the history of science stand out as unquestionable instantiations of serendipity: Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (cited by Slowiczek and Peters 2007; Kakko and Inkinen 2009; McCay-Peet and Toms 2015), Antoine Henri Becquerel’s finding of X-rays (cited by Cannon 1940; Allen et al. 2013; Rosenman 1988), Watson and Crick’s reflection on the alpha-helix structure of DNA (Darbellay et al. 2014; Campanario 1996; Copeland 2017), and the list grows longer as the historiographical narrations (and the contemporary scientific reports) become more detailed. Indeed, the fortune of the term serendipity is connected to the recent acknowledgement of the role of chance in scientific processes (Cannon 1940; Austin 2003; Kipnis 2005; * Selene Arfini [email protected] 1
Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section, University of Pavia, Piazza Botta 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy
Catellin 2014) as well as the importance of a skillful perspective that scientists need to enact in order to exploit those lucky events (Allen et al. 2013; Copeland 2017). Considering this increasing attention to the role of both intentional/explicit and unintentional/accidental factors that affect the course of scientific endeavors, finding a defining formula for serendipity has acquired relevance in the context of philosophy of science. Therefore, numerous scholars have tried to draw a clarifying description fo
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