User:Tom dl/Scientific Discovery

Scientific Discovery is the process of augmenting the knowledge of the scientific community. In the philosophy of science, discovery is widely considered 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". 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 science.