Troubling Anomalies and Exciting Conjectures: A Bipolar Model of Scientific Discovery

Emotion Review 9 (2) (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

A model is proposed to explain how emotional and cognitive processes drive epistemic activities within individual scientists. In this account, emotion–cognition interactions produce cyclical phases of accommodative and assimilative epistemic activities, called thought experiments and empirical experiments, respectively. During thought experiments, scientists ruminate over troubling anomalies in order to generate the theoretical ingredients necessary for constructing new conjectures. During empirical experiments, scientists explore exciting conjectures in order to cover the empirical ground necessary to discover new anomalies. Critically, epistemic activities are accompanied and sustained by positive and negative emotional moods. The main virtue of the model is its specification of a coupled feedback mechanism that explains the dynamics and the temporal dependencies between empirical and theoretical activities underlying scientific discovery.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Finite Axiomatizability and Scientific Discovery.Daniel N. Osherson & Scott Weinstein - 1988 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988:409 - 412.
Scientific discovery: that-what’s and what-that’s.Samuel Schindler - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2.
Explaining Scientific Discovery.Aleksandar Jokic - 1991 - Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara
Complexity versus complex systems: A new approach to scientific discovery.F. Tito Arecchi - 1999 - In L. Magnani, N. J. Nersessian & P. Thagard (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery. Kluwer/Plenum. pp. 181--196.
Scientific discovery on positive data via belief revision.Eric Martin & Daniel Osherson - 2000 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (5):483-506.
Scientific discovery from the perspective of hypothesis acceptance.Eric Martin & Daniel Osherson - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S331-S341.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-01-15

Downloads
8 (#1,138,312)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?