Scientific Discovery Reloaded

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 ‘frie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTopoi Vol. 39; no. 4; pp. 847 - 856
Main Author Ippoliti, Emiliano
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Education
Empiricism
Hydrocarbons
Hypotheses
Logic
Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Technology
Traditions
Discovery
Logic
Reasoning
Algorithm
Heuristics
Psychology
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0167-7411
1572-8749
DOI:10.1007/s11245-017-9531-3