Scientific discovery satisfies the yearning of scientists for progression in their disciplines. It is also a central theme in the popular imagination, from stories about eureka moments to scientific miracles such as Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance and Josiah Willard Gibbs’ chemical thermodynamics. Scientific discovery is an important topic that has prompted many philosophers of science to formulate theories about it. These theories vary significantly, but they all include inferential and non-inferential ways of accounting for discovery.
Some of these theories claim that there is a distinct logic of scientific discovery. These theories of the logic of discovery, which differ from traditional inductive and deductive logics, describe the reasoning strategies used in episodes of successful scientific inquiry. The aim of these theories is to draw out and provide a schematic representation of the reasoning processes that lead to new ideas.
Other approaches to scientific discovery, which are based in more general methodologies of knowledge generation and proper scientific reasoning, are less characterized by the notion of a specific logical pattern of discovery. Rather, these theories describe the iterative process of generating, assessing and reworking models, which may be either inductive or hypothetico-deductive, to arrive at a promising, tentative hypothesis.
The goal of these methodologies is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas. This issue of Topoi aims to explore these inferential and heuristic paths to discovery from both a theoretical and a practical viewpoint. It includes a philosophical analysis of the various theories about discovery and case studies of how scientists have been using these techniques to discover new concepts.