In the last decade, scientists have figured out how to identify and sequence the genomes of Neanderthals. They have mapped the metabolic pathways of fruit bats and discovered how wounds heal in both primates and fish. They have even shown that up to 2% of the modern human population is descended from our ancient evolutionary relatives. Yet these advances, and many others like them, have come only after scientists learned something about the process of scientific discovery itself.
During the 19th century, many scholars criticized the logical empiricism that was then popular and emphasized the need to distinguish between the creative leap of a genius that makes new discoveries and the actual reasoning processes that lead to them. The work of William Whewell in particular stood out because he articulated and developed the notion that a happy thought is only one element of discovery; there is also a previous condition of intellect and a set of maxims that enables a person to notice things that others have missed.
More recently, a number of philosophers have again become attuned to actual scientific practices and have renewed interest in the concept of heuristic strategies of knowledge generation. They argue that the Kuhnian paradigm of discovery is a flawed one because it misrepresents the actual process as a series of aha moments. Moreover, they argue that a much more accurate representation of the actual process is what they call generative justification. This is a form of justification that draws on existing knowledge to construct new theories and claims.
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