Scientific discovery is a topic that has been treated in a wide range of ways by philosophy and by other disciplines. Some approaches, like those of the pragmatist tradition, offer comprehensive theories of the mental and physical-practical operations that make up knowledge generation. These theories, which have been characterized as “logics of discovery,” show that the reasoning involved in scientific discovery is more systematic than the aha moment, narrowly conceived. They do, however, leave open the possibility that the discovery process may not be completely analyzable.
Other approaches to the logic of scientific discovery are based on empirical research on the actual processes of scientific discovery and the cognitive mechanisms that underlie them. These investigations, including those of psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers, have opened up a new perspective on the nature of scientific discovery that has transformed the treatment of the issue by philosophy of science.
In the first of these lines of response, philosophers accept that there is no logical way to prescribe the production of new ideas and that it is often impossible to reconstruct logically the processes that produce discoveries. This is a common position in the tradition of Karl Popper and others, which holds that only the outcome of a discovery (e.g., the identification of oxygen) is amenable to logical inquiry.
Other approaches to the logical problem of scientific discovery hold that there are many paths to innovation and that these paths are highly context-dependent. They include heuristic strategies for problem-solving, such as the “means-ends” analysis that involves identifying the differences between the present and goal situations and then looking for operators capable of bringing about the desired change in those situations.