Models of Discovery and Creativity

by Meheus, Joke; Nickles, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9789048134205
• ISBN10: 904813420X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-03
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
Unexpected discoveries, Graded Structures, and the Difference between Acceptance and Neglect	p. 1
The Conceptual Analysis	p. 3
Nuclear Physics	p. 4
Philosophical Morals	p. 22
Conceptual Comparison and Conceptual Innovation	p. 29
Discovering Mechanisms in Molecular Biology: Finding and Fixing Incompleteness and Incorrectness	p. 43
Introduction	p. 43
Characterization of Mechanisms	p. 45
Revision of Incomplete Schemata	p. 47
Revision of Incorrect Schemata	p. 50
Conclusion	p. 53
On the Role of Thought-Experiments in Mathematical Discovery	p. 57
Archimedes's Method	p. 58
Impossible Numbers	p. 60
Conclusion	p. 63
Experimental Systems, Investigative Pathways, and the Nature of Discovery	p. 65
Abduction as a Heuristic Constraint	p. 81
Introduction	p. 81
The Problem of Abduction	p. 83
Evolutionary Biology	p. 86
Conclusions	p. 92
Creative Abduction and Hypothesis Withdrawal	p. 95
Change in Theoretical Systems	p. 95
Abduction: Sentential, Model-Based, Manipulative	p. 97
Governing Inconsistencies in Abductive Reasoning	p. 104
Withdrawing Unfalsifiable Hypotheses	p. 114
Conceptual Change: Creativity, Cognition, and Culture	p. 127
Introduction	p. 127
Interpreting Conceptual Practices: Cognitive-Historical Analysis	p. 127
Cognition and Culture: Situated and Distributed Cognition	p. 131
Creativity in Conceptual Change: The Role of Model-Based Reasoning	p. 137
Model-based Reasoning as Situated and Distributed Reasoning	p. 153
Culture and Cognition: Implications for Creativity	p. 158
The Strange Story of Scientific Method	p. 167
Introduction	p. 167
Traditional Views of Method and Discovery	p. 169
Scientific Method (So-Conceived) Is Impossible	p. 171
Reasons for Optimism?	p. 181
Two Objections	p. 184
The Triumph of the Darwinian Method?	p. 186
BV+SR: Madness or Method?	p. 190
The Generality Question and the NFL Theorems	p. 198
The Classical Discovery Program Revisited	p. 200
Tradition and Innovation: Exploring and Transforming Conceptual Structures	p. 209
Introduction	p. 209
Taditionalists and Iconoclasts	p. 210
Scientific Structures	p. 212
Applied and Intractable Fields	p. 214
Discovery in the Mature Sciences	p. 216
Exploring Paradigms	p. 218
A Purposeful Alliance in the Service of Creative Research: The Network of Vitamin Investigators	p. 223
Introduction	p. 223
The Significance of Collective Work	p. 224
How are the Results Evaluated from the Current Perspective?	p. 226
How Effective was the Network?	p. 234
Conclusion	p. 235
Index	p. 237
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