Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity – serie

"Science constructs its objects": is this a metaphor? It does not necessarily mean anyway that the real does not pre-exist. Only that in the final instance it is the Other, of which we know neither the limits nor the figure and to which we only have access through the constructions we make of it. Or, in semiotic terms borrowed from Charles S. Peirce, the world is the 'dynamic object' that intervenes in science only through the 'immediate objects' that manifest themselves in signs. And even then the choice of the term 'immediate' is not entirely felicitous: it would be better to talk of 'mediated objects', since their conception is mediated by the conditions from which perception as weIl as the language that expresses it derive. The preference bestowed on certain constructions over others results from the slighter recalcitrance in imagining a dynamic object through one or another mediated object. This recalcitrance that prompts one to surrender constructions does not come directly from the real, from the dynamic object, but from other constructions. Again, this does not mean that reality does not ex ist, but that it only 'speaks', confirms and objects, to the extent that it is being questioned within a certain form, by certain instruments, in a certain language. Even if it appears recalcitrant, the dynamic object intervenes only through another construction. Man, not nature, decides on the form to be considered, the instruments and language to be adopted.

For centuries, inconsistencies were seen as a hindrance to good reasoning, and their role in the sciences was ignored. In recent years, however, logicians as well as philosophers and historians have showed a growing interest in the matter. Central to this change were the advent of paraconsistent logics, the shift in attention from finished theories to construction processes, and the recognition that most scientific theories were at some point either internally inconsistent or incompatible with other accepted findings. The new interest gave rise to important questions. How is `logical anarchy' avoided? Is it ever rational to accept an inconsistent theory? In what sense, if any, can inconsistent theories be considered as true? The present collection of papers is the first to deal with this kind of questions. It contains case studies as well as philosophical analyses, and presents an excellent overview of the different approaches in the domain.

Since the origin of the modern sciences, our views on discovery and creativity had a remarkable history. Originally, discovery was seen as an integral part of methodology and the logic of discovery as algorithmic or nearly algorithmic. During the nineteenth century, conceptions in line with romanticism led to the famous opposition between the context of discovery and the context of justification, culminating in a view that banned discovery from methodology. The revival of the methodological investigation of discovery, which started some thirty years ago, derived its major impetus from historical and sociological studies of the sciences and from developments within cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Today, a large majority of philosophers of science agrees that the classical conception as well as the romantic conception are mistaken. Against the classical conception, it is generally accepted that truly novel discoveries are not the result of simply applying some standardized procedure. Against the romantic conception, it is rejected that discoveries are produced by unstructured flashes of insight.An especially important result of the contemporary study concerns the availability of (descriptive and normative) models for explaining discoveries and creative processes. Descriptive models mainly aim at explaining the origin of novel products; normative models moreover address the question how rational researchers should proceed when confronted with problems for which a standard procedure is missing. The present book provides an overview of these models and of the important changes they induced within methodology. As appears from several papers, the methodological study of discovery and creativity led to profound changes in our conceptions of justification and acceptance, of rationality, of scientific change, and of conceptual change. The book contains contributions from both historians and philosophers of science. All of them, however, are methodological in the contemporary sense of the term. The central values of this methodology are empirical accurateness, clarity and precision, and rationality. The different contributions realize these values by their interdisciplinary nature. Some philosophically oriented papers 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 and hypotheses.

"Science constructs its objects": is this a metaphor? It does not necessarily mean anyway that the real does not pre-exist. Only that in the final instance it is the Other, of which we know neither the limits nor the figure and to which we only have access through the constructions we make of it. Or, in semiotic terms borrowed from Charles S. Peirce, the world is the 'dynamic object' that intervenes in science only through the 'immediate objects' that manifest themselves in signs. And even then the choice of the term 'immediate' is not entirely felicitous: it would be better to talk of 'mediated objects', since their conception is mediated by the conditions from which perception as weIl as the language that expresses it derive. The preference bestowed on certain constructions over others results from the slighter recalcitrance in imagining a dynamic object through one or another mediated object. This recalcitrance that prompts one to surrender constructions does not come directly from the real, from the dynamic object, but from other constructions. Again, this does not mean that reality does not ex ist, but that it only 'speaks', confirms and objects, to the extent that it is being questioned within a certain form, by certain instruments, in a certain language. Even if it appears recalcitrant, the dynamic object intervenes only through another construction. Man, not nature, decides on the form to be considered, the instruments and language to be adopted.

For centuries, inconsistencies were seen as a hindrance to good reasoning, and their role in the sciences was ignored. In recent years, however, logicians as well as philosophers and historians have showed a growing interest in the matter. Central to this change were the advent of paraconsistent logics, the shift in attention from finished theories to construction processes, and the recognition that most scientific theories were at some point either internally inconsistent or incompatible with other accepted findings. The new interest gave rise to important questions. How is `logical anarchy' avoided? Is it ever rational to accept an inconsistent theory? In what sense, if any, can inconsistent theories be considered as true? The present collection of papers is the first to deal with this kind of questions. It contains case studies as well as philosophical analyses, and presents an excellent overview of the different approaches in the domain.