Scientific discovery has the potential to answer fundamental questions about our world and lead to tremendous benefits and value. The challenge is to understand the processes of discovery and to improve our ability to make new discoveries.
A wide range of philosophical responses have been offered to the problem of discovery. Early work emphasized the importance of the eureka moment, while later contributions focused on the nature of observations and experiments and the processes of having an insight, articulating and developing that insight, and testing or verifying it. Various attempts have been made to provide a more fully unified account of these elements, including accounts that incorporate empirical research in fields such as sociology and cognitive science.
It is now widely recognized that it is usually impossible to identify the precise moment at which a discovery was made or even the discoverer. Kuhn pointed out that a discovery often occurs over a long period of time and that, for example, the discovery of oxygen was not solely the work of Antoine Lavoisier but also of C. W. Scheele and Joseph Priestley.
Contemporary accounts of scientific discovery are influenced by empirical research in fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Social epistemology provides a different perspective, reconceptualizing knowledge generation as group process. The result is that many of the issues that have occupied philosophers about discovery now fall within the purview of empirical research, and a growing body of rational reconstructions of historical episodes of discovery and of biological mechanisms have emerged.
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