User:Tom dl/Scientific Discovery

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Scientific Discovery is the process of augmenting the knowledge of the scientific community. In the philosophy of science, discovery is widely consideredFor example, see Kantorovich (1993, p. 13) to be a realist word as it implies that what is added to the scientific corpus is a description of reality, rather than an empirically adequate, anti-realist invention. However, the word discovery is regularly used by realists and anti-realists alike to describe the process of finding out something unexpected and integrating it into science either by modifying a theory or creating a new theory. As a part of the philosophy of science, discovery had been dismissed by the logical positivism movement of the early twentieth century as impossible to rationalise, because it involved an "irrational element"{{harvnb|Popper|1959|p=8}}. N. R. Hanson's seminal work "Patterns of Discovery" (1958) influenced philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn to argue for a rational account of discovery. Philosophy of discovery has consequently grown as a discipline in the philosophical literature, but is still dwarfed by the traditional analysis of justification - the supposed other half of scienceSee Nickles (1978, pp. 8-22) for an in-depth discussion of the "discovery/justification" divide.