The prevailing view of scientific discovery, often characterized as a eureka moment or an unanalyzable creative intuition of the human mind, was widely held in the first half of the 20th century. But today, there is broad agreement that philosophers of science can legitimately analyze the cognitive processes that lead to discoveries. Resources from cognitive science, psychology, and empirical studies of actual scientific practice are being incorporated into philosophical analyses of the structure and conditions of knowledge generation. Sociological theories of scientific inquiry, for example, reconceptualize knowledge generation as a group process.
Some scholars argue that a distinctively logical pattern – the logic of abductive inferences – governs how new insights are devised and justified. Others, following William Whewell, argue that the act of conceiving a novel idea is a separate process from the articulation and development of that thought and can be understood using tools of philosophical analysis.
In pre-paradigmatic periods or times of paradigm crisis, discoveries can occur by observing anomalous phenomena and developing tentative theories that generate new expectations. Experiments and observations can be designed to test these new expectations, and a discovery may result from the failure of an experiment to produce a desired outcome or from an unexpected finding that challenges existing assumptions.
Other approaches to the problem of the demarcation criterion are based on a consideration of how scientists make heuristic decisions in complex, variable, and changing environments. They also recognize that the heuristic strategies that are applied in the course of scientific inquiry can be analyzed using techniques from philosophy of science and empirical work on real-world cognition, including cognitive research and psychology.