Abstract
Understanding the growth of scientific knowledge is a central problem in philosophy of science today, a part of which takes the form of understanding how new knowledge arises and how it becomes unified with existing knowledge. As a way of tackling this problem, one may ask: how do new fields arise in science? And how is the knowledge in a new field related to that in other fields?In recent work I characterized a scientific field as an area of science consisting of the following elements: a central problem, a domain of items taken to be facts related to that problem, general explanatory factors and goals providing expectations as to how the problem is to be solved, techniques and methods, and concepts, laws and theories related to the problem which attempt to realize the explanatory goals (p. 44). Also in that work, my coauthor and I discussed interfield theories which serve to link two fields by postulating specific kinds of relations between them.
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