Models of Discovery and Creativity

by Meheus, J.; Nickles, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9789400731523
• ISBN10: 9400731523
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-06
• Publisher: Springer Nature

Summary

Since the origin of the modern sciences, our views on discovery and creativityhad a remarkable history. Originally, discovery was seen as an integral part ofmethodology and the logic of discovery as algorithmic or nearly algorithmic.During the nineteenth century, conceptions in line with romanticism led tothe famous opposition between the context of discovery and the context ofjustification, culminating in a view that banned discovery from methodology.The revival of the methodological investigation of discovery, which startedsome thirty years ago, derived its major impetus from historical and sociologicalstudies of the sciences and from developments within cognitive psychology andartificial intelligence.Today, a large majority of philosophers of science agrees that the classicalconception as well as the romantic conception are mistaken. Against the classicalconception, it is generally accepted that truly novel discoveries are not theresult of simply applying some standardized procedure. Against the romanticconception, it is rejected that discoveries are produced by unstructured flashesof insight.An especially important result of the contemporary study concerns the availabilityof (descriptive and normative) models for explaining discoveries andcreative processes. Descriptive models mainly aim at explaining the origin ofnovel products; normative models moreover address the question how rationalresearchers should proceed when confronted with problems for which astandard procedure is missing.The present book provides an overview of these models and of the importantchanges they induced within methodology. As appears from several papers,the methodological study of discovery and creativity led to profound changesin our conceptions of justification and acceptance, of rationality, of scientificchange, and of conceptual change.The book contains contributions from both historians and philosophers ofscience. All of them, however, are methodological in the contemporary senseof the term. The central values of this methodology are empirical accurateness,clarity and precision, and rationality. The different contributions realizethese values by their interdisciplinary nature. Some philosophically orientedpapers rely on historical case studies and results from the cognitive sciences,others on recent results from the computer sciences and/or non-standard logics.The historically oriented papers address central philosophical questions andhypotheses.