A scientific discovery, such as a new cure or an explanation of the behavior of a mineral, usually involves the “colligation” of existing facts into a theory, that is, into a general conception or interpretation. This theory must then be verified, which in turn requires an extensive process of specification and clarification. This verification must involve judging the predictive power, simplicity, and “consilience” of the colligation (the happy thought) relative to the data at hand.
This rich account of scientific inquiry focuses on the context of discovery and provides an alternative to theories that treat of scientific discoveries in a narrow sense or as an unanswerable mystical event. Its central claim is that the process of discovery consists in an extended reasoning process involving the exploration and articulation of tentative ideas, which leads to a non-necessarily deductivist form of justification. This approach draws on philosophical analyses of the nature of discovery and information from empirical research into actual human reasoning patterns.
A major challenge to these accounts of scientific discovery comes from philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as a methodology of discovery and that the notion of a logical procedure for generating new ideas is misguided. In the pragmatist tradition, however, there is a rebuttal to this argument that opens up a philosophical perspective on the nature of scientific discovery. This response combines philosophical analysis with information from empirical sciences such as cognitive science, sociology, and AI research, which focus on strategies of human thinking.