Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.
The Accidental Scientist explores the role of chance and error in scientific, medical and commercial innovation, outlining exactly how some of the most well-known products, gadgets and useful gizmos came to be.
When first published in 1959, this book revolutionized contemporary thinking about science and knowledge. It remains one of the most widely read books about science to come out of the 20th century.
Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative--and hence unanalyzable--whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs--BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL--are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science.
It is fast becoming a cliche that scientific discovery is being rediscovered. For two philosophical generations (that of the Founders and that of the Followers of the logical positivist and logical empiricist movements), discovery had been consigned to the domain of the intractable, the ineffable, the inscrutable. The philosophy of science was focused on the so-called context of justification as its proper domain. More recently, as the exclusivity of the logical reconstruc tion program in philosophy of science came under question, and as the critique of justification developed within the framework of logical and epistemological analysis, the old question of scientific discovery, which had been put on the back burner, began to emerge once again. Emphasis on the relation of the history of science to the philosophy of science, and attention to the question of theory change and theory replacement, also served to legitimate a new concern with the origins of scientific change to be found within discovery and invention. How welcome then to see what a wide range of issues and what a broad representation of philosophers and historians of science have been brought together in the present two volumes of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science! For what these volumes achieve, in effect, is the continuation of a tradition which had once been strong in the philosophy of science - namely, that tradition which addressed the question of scientific discovery as a central question in the understanding of science.
"Reinventing Discovery argues that we are in the early days of the most dramatic change in how science is done in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by new online tools, which are transforming and radically accelerating scientific discovery"--
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