Scientific discovery is the process of adopting, articulating, and evaluating new ideas or hypotheses prior to rigorous testing. Despite the wide use of this term, philosophers have not always agreed on what constitutes scientific discovery and, in particular, how it differs from the more general notion of knowledge generation.
A recurring issue is whether or not it is possible to identify the precise moment of discovery and, in some cases, the individual responsible. Kuhn, for example, argues that, with the exception of certain historical examples such as the discovery of oxygen (O2), it is usually impossible to pinpoint exactly when or by whom something was discovered. In fact, he points out that both Lavoisier and C. W. Scheele independently identified the gas resulting from heating certain solid substances, but only Lavoisier correctly interpreted it as being a new kind of gas, which he named oxygen.
Philosophers have also disagreed about whether the process of developing a hypothesis—the “colligation” in Whewell’s terms—is or is not a part of discovery proper and, if so, whether it has justificatory force. Alternative conceptions of discovery, especially in the pragmatist tradition, emphasize that it is an extended process that includes the reasoning processes through which a new insight is articulated and developed.
More recently, philosophical attention has been focusing on the ways in which scientists generate new ideas and hypotheses by drawing on cognitive science, psychology, neurology, and computational research in order to demystify how human minds generate novel scientific concepts. In addition, work in social epistemology has opened up a further perspective on knowledge generation by reconceptualizing it as a group process.
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