Joke Meheus

Models of Discovery and Creativity - Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity Joke Meheus 2009 edition

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Table of Contents: Foreword -- Preface -- Unexpected discoveries, Graded Structures, and the Difference between Acceptance and Neglect / Hanne Andersen -- 1. The Conceptual Analysis -- 2. Nuclear Physics -- 3. Philosophical Morals -- Conceptual Comparison and Conceptual Innovation / Harold I. Brown -- Discovering Mechanisms in Molecular Biology: Finding and Fixing Incompleteness and Incorrectness / Lindley Darden -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Characterization of Mechanisms -- 3. Revision of Incomplete Schemata -- 4. Revision of Incorrect Schemata -- 5. Conclusion -- On the Role of Thought-Experiments in Mathematical Discovery / Eduard Glas -- 1. Archimedes's Method -- 2. Impossible Numbers -- 3. Conclusion -- Experimental Systems, Investigative Pathways, and the Nature of Discovery / Frederic L. Holmes -- Abduction as a Heuristic Constraint / Scott A. Kleiner -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Problem of Abduction -- 3. Evolutionary Biology -- 4. Conclusions -- Creative Abduction and Hypothesis Withdrawal / Lorenzo Magnani -- 1. Change in Theoretical Systems -- 2. Abduction: Sentential, Model-Based, Manipulative -- 3. Governing Inconsistencies in Abductive Reasoning -- 5. Withdrawing Unfalsifiable Hypotheses -- Conceptual Change: Creativity, Cognition, and Culture / Nancy J. Nersessian -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Interpreting Conceptual Practices: Cognitive-Historical Analysis -- 3. Cognition and Culture: Situated and Distributed Cognition -- 4. Creativity in Conceptual Change: The Role of Model-Based Reasoning -- 5. Model-based Reasoning as Situated and Distributed Reasoning -- 6. Culture and Cognition: Implications for Creativity -- The Strange Story of Scientific Method / Thomas Nickles -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Traditional Views of Method and Discovery -- 3. Scientific Method (So-Conceived) Is Impossible -- 4. Reasons for Optimism? -- 5. Two Objections -- 6. The Triumph of the Darwinian Method? -- 7. BV+SR: Madness or Method? -- 8. The Generality Question and the NFL Theorems -- 9. The Classical Discovery Program Revisited -- Tradition and Innovation: Exploring and Transforming Conceptual Structures / Matti Sintonen -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Taditionalists and Iconoclasts -- 3. Scientific Structures -- 4. Applied and Intractable Fields -- 5. Discovery in the Mature Sciences -- 6. Exploring Paradigms -- A Purposeful Alliance in the Service of Creative Research: The Network of Vitamin Investigators / Petra Werner -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Significance of Collective Work -- 3. How are the Results Evaluated from the Current Perspective? -- 4. How Effective was the Network? -- 5. Conclusion -- Index. Publisher Marketing: 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.

Contributor Bio:  Nickles, Thomas Nickles has taught at the University of Illinois (Urbana) and at the University of Chicago. He is now Foundation Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno.