Creativity, Invention and the Computational Metaphor: Prolegomenon to a Case Study

Abstract

Philosophy of science has traditionally been concerned with the logical and epistemological foundations of the natural sciences. Furthermore, following a distinction, usually attributed to Hans Reichenbach (1938), between the ‘context of discovery’—the actual process whereby a discovery is made—and the ‘context of justification’—that is, the logical structure of scientific theories and theory justification—much of the philosophy of science of the first half of this century was preoccupied with the latter problem. The context of discovery, according to Reichenbach, belongs properly to psychology. Philosophy of science is to be concerned with the construction of the logical grounds for why scientific theories, laws, hypotheses, etc., are (or are not) deemed ‘correct’; or with what constitutes a valid ‘explanation’ in science. A similar view was expressed at about the same time by Karl Popper (1934/1968) who, like Reichenbach, distinguished between the psychology and the logic of knowledge and, arguing that every process of discovery entailed a degree of irrationality or intuition, consigned the problem of discovery to the scrapheap of psychology.