Table Of ContentON SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY
VOLUME 34
ON SCIENTIFIC
DISCOVERY
The Erice Lectures 1977
Edited by
MIRKO DRAZEN GRMEK
Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne
ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University
GUIDO CIMINO
Istituto della Enciclopedia /taliana, Rome
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND I BOSTON: U.S.A.
LONDON: ENGLAND
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
International School for the History of Science, Erice, Italy, 1977.
On scientific discovery.
(Boston studies in the philosophy of science ; v. 34)
Revised papers from a course held at Erice, Italy, Feb. 16-22, 1977, and spon
sored by the Majorana Centre, the Domus Galilaeana, and the Istituto della Enciclopedia
italiana.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Science-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Science-Philosophy-Addresses,
essays, lectures. 3. Science-Methodology-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Grmek,
Mirko Drden, II. Cohen, Robert Sonne. III. Cimino, Guido. IV. Ettore
Majorana International Centre for Scientific Culture. V. Domus Galilaeana, Pisa.
VI. Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana. VII. Title. VIII. Series.
Q174.B67 vol. 34 [QI71] SOls [500] 80-23792
ISBN-13: 978-90-277-1123-6 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-1284-3
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-1284-3
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
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In all other countries, sold and distributed
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P.O. Box 322, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
D. Reidel Publishing Company is a member of the Kluwer Group.
This volume was prepared for publication with the editorial assistance of
Carolyn R. Fawcett.
Support for the translations from Italian was provided by the
Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1981' by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 15t Edition 198 I
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced. or
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T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I. GENERAL PROBLEMS
MIRKO D. GRMEK / A Plea for Freeing the History of Scientific
Discoveries from Myth 9
GERARD RADNITZKY / Progress and Rationality in Research:
Science from the Viewpoint of Popperian Methodology 43
JOSEPH AGASSI / The Problems of Scientific Validation 103
JOHN D. NORTH / Science and Analogy 115
MARCELLO PERA / Inductive Method and Scientific Discovery 141
VITTORIO SOMENZI / Scientific Discovery from the Viewpoint
of Evolutionary Epistemology 167
DEREK DE SOLLA PRICE / The Analytical (Quantitative) Theory
of Science and Its Implications for the Nature of Scientific Dis-
covery 179
GABRIEL GOHAU / Difficulties Inherent in a Pedagogy of Dis-
covery in the Teaching of the Sciences 191
VINCENZO CAPPELLETTI / Discovery and Vocation 211
PART II. CASE STUDIES
JACQUES ROGER / Two Scientific Discoveries: Their Genesis and
Destiny 229
RICHARD TO ELLNER / Logical and Psychological Aspects of the
Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood 239
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
LUIGI BELLONI / The Discovery of Duodenal Ancylostoma and
of Its Pathogenic Power 261
SALVO D'AGOSTINO / Weber and Maxwell on the Discovery of
the Velocity of Light in Nineteenth Century Electrodynamics 281
HOWARD E. GRUBER / Cognitive Psychology, Scientific Crea-
tivity, and the Case Study Method 295
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 323
NAME INDEX 327
PREFACE
The 1977 lectures of the International School for the History of Science at
Erice in Sicily were devoted to that vexing but inexorable problem, the
nature of scientific discovery. With all that has been written, by scientists
themselves, by historians and philosophers and social theorists, by psycholo
gists and psychiatrists, by logicians and novelists, the problem remains elusive.
Happily we are able to bring the penetrating lectures from Erice that summer
to a wider audience in this volume of theoretical investigations and detailed
case studies.
The ancient and lovely town of Erice in Northwest Sicily, 750 m above the
sea, was famous throughout the Mediterranean for its temple of the goddess
of nature, Venus Erycina, said to have been built by Daedalus. As philosophers
and historians of the natural sciences, we hope that the stimulating atmo
sphere of Erice will to some extent be transmitted by these pages.
We are especially grateful to that generous and humane physician and historian
of science, Dr. Vincenzo Cappelletti, himself a creative scientist, for his
collaboration in bringing this work to completion. We admire his intelligent
devotion to fostering creative interaction between scientists and historians
of science as Director of the School of History of Science within the great
Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture at Erice, as well as for his
imaginative leadership of the Istituto della Encic10pedia Italiana.
Our thanks, too, to Professor Mirko Grmek for his cooperative work as
Co-Director of the School and in the preparation of this volume; and especially
to Dr. Guido Cimino for his extraordinary and energetic competence at all
stages of the organization and planning of the School and of this book.
Center for the Philosophy and ROBERT S. COHEN
History of Science MARX W. WARTOFSKY
Boston University
August 1980
vii
INTRODUCTION
Every two years the International School for the History of Science, located
at the Ettore Majorana Center in Erice, Italy, invites historians, epistemologists
and research scientists from all over the world for meetings devoted to discus
sion of some of the significant problems currently facing the scientific com
munity and the world of culture. Furthermore, the nearly sixty other schools
of the Majorana Center contribute an indirect but effective indication of the
lines along which scientists and historians can work together.
The purpose of the course of the International School for the History of
Science held at Erice, 16-22 February 1977, sponsored by the Majorana
Center, the Domus Galilaeana and the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana,
was to produce a critical examination of the logical, psychological, cultural
and social aspects of scientific discovery. This book is the fIrst publication to
be issued as a result of one of the School's courses, and in presenting it to the
reader, we must emphasize that it is not the 'proceedings' of the course,
namely a faithful record of the lively reports, communications and discus
sions held at the Ettore Majorana Center. Rather we preferred to ask the
speakers to prepare a new version of their papers which took into account the
subsequent debate and also the requirements of a monographic publication.
Thus, after two years the problems and positions expressed at Erice have
crystallized to produce an image of the course which, though perhaps less
lively than the event itself, is more rigorous in its presentation.
This book sets out to ascertain the contemporary state in a particular
fIeld of the historiography of science and to make an original contribution
to topics bordering on both the philosophy of science and the history of
science. The contributors and the editors are pleased to have the volume
published under the auspices of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science.
For a long time epistemologists have considered scientific theories to be
parts or examples of a body of knowledge which is free of contradictions
in its structure and based on 'foundations', on propositions which cannot be
reduced to others. A more recent, different and reciprocal way of consider
ing science is that of an expanding body of knowledge which increases the
domain of the known at the expense of the unknown. The analysis of scientifIc
1
MD. Grmek, R. S. Cohen, and G. Cimino (eds.), On Scientific Discovery, 1-6.
Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
2 INTRODUCTION
discovery, as the instrument of the growth of knowledge, has taken on ever
increasing importance. Interest in the genesis and methodology of discovery
by now has taken its place, with the same relevance and value, alongside of
the traditional orientation towards axiomatic reconstructions, in the his
toriography and philosophy of scientific thought.
The expression 'scientific discovery', however, requires clarification: it is
a broad denotans with an imprecise connotatum. First of all, is discovery a
fact or an idea? This question, of crucial importance, was raised more than a
century ago by Claude Bernard, a great discoverer, in his bookAn Introduc
tion to the Study of Experimental Medicine:
A fact is nothing in itself, it has value only through the idea connected with it or through
the proof it supplies. We have said elsewhere that, when one calls a new fact a discovery,
the fact itself is not the discovery, but rather the new idea derived from it; in the same
way, when a fact proves anything, the fact does not itself give the proof, but only the
rational relation which it establishes between the phenomenon and its cause. This rela
tion is the scientific truth which we must now discuss further. 1
In 1877, Hermann von Helmholtz, like Claude Bernard, insisted in his
essay on Das Denken in der Medicin - at a time when the controversy over
J. R. Mayer's priority in discovering the principle of the conservation of energy
was still fresh in everyone's memory - on some particular features of those
'discovered ideas', 'gefundene Ideen' (Bernard's 'new ideas') which, if proven
important, are then called 'discoveries.'
The first discovery of a new law, is the discovery of a similarity which has hitherto been
concealed in the course of natural processes. It is a manifestation of that which our fore
fathers in a serious sense described as 'wit' ... It is something which cannot be forced,
and which cannot be acquired by any known method .... The proof that the ideas
formed do not merely scrape together superficial resemblances, but are produced by a
quick glance into the connection of the whole, can only be acquired when these ideas are
completely developed - that is, for a newly discovered natural law, only by its agree
ment with facts.2
Helmholtz went on to say that a printer's case of type contains the entire
wisdom of the world. A discovery must be formulated as a rational tran
scription, but the transcription must be organic, and it must be in agreement
with empirical data.
Thus the rational character of scientific discovery had already been under
stood and affirmed during the last century. A new fact, a new 'property of
Nature', as Mach would say, became known to others through the proposi
tions by which the discoverer describes, dermes and explains the factual. Even
from the discoverer's viewpoint, however, what is discovered is what he him-
INTRODUCTION 3
self thinks and states about an observation or the result of an experiment.
Sometimes the statement is bare, a simple protocol, but the passage from per
ceiving to affirming is always fundamental to discovering. This explains how
it can be that there have been discoveries for which the affirmation, in the
form of an hypothesis, clearly preceded observation and which in turn was
not the source of an unforeseen novelty, but the confIrmation of an assumed
one. This would furthermore explain the possibility of purely theoretical and
formal discoveries in that field of logic and mathematics which is rightfully
a part of the realm of scientific knowledge.
A discovery is not a fact, but the statement of a fact. This is, in summary,
one principal conclusion to be drawn from all the contributions gathered in
this volume. A discovery is a new statement, characterized by a novelty,
where novelty is understood as what cannot be deduced, but must be con
structed within the sphere of logic, or observed in the course of experimental
science, whether physical or biological. 'Knowing' can be 'discovering' if it is
able to unfold itself and grow, and in growing renew its own structure. With
respect to new knowledge, old knowledge may be a cognitive or epistemo
logical obstacle, almost a meta-obstacle, if it stands in the way of observation
or construction; or in other words, if it prevents the establishment of experi
mental or constructive concepts, of structures or forms which are different
from those already known. Discovery is knowledge in growth, which thereby
extends its domain, or attributes a different order to itself. Any body of
knowledge which considers itself complete cannot accept the specific moment
of understanding that discovering is: an unfolding, a disclosure, and thereby
a renewing of thought.
Discovery, like intuition - in other words like the constructive act taken
in its presentation of the goal it will eventually reach - and like observation,
is a cognitive tension between participating and affirming. The subject perceiv
ing a physical event, or representing, constructing an ideal form, is connected
with the object while constituting its very defmition. To express the perceived
event or the constructed form, is to begin to defme them, to insert them into
a universe of premises and relationships. Through the perceptive or construc
tive unity of the two terms, the object enables the subject to fabricate the
science of a real, existing, or at least coherent world; but the subject, in turn,
enables the object to be placed in that universal framework of which science
is, or can be, the representation. Since object and subject, fact and idea, be
come united in the act of discovery, history, as well as the philosophy of
discovery, will follow different paths in order to state and expound the terms
of the problem confronting them: on the part of the object, its constitutive
