Scientific discovery is a process of conceiving new ideas, articulating them, and developing them. The emergence of a variety of philosophical and empirical accounts of scientific discovery in the early modern period led to controversy over whether or not a methodology for discovering science could be established.
In the end, however, most of these accounts settled on the idea that scientific discovery is a cognitive process characterized by several types of reasoning strategies, such as experiment and observation, induction and deduction, hypothesis testing, and weak evaluation procedures. Many of these accounts also incorporated empirical studies of actual discoveries in the past and present and worked with resources from other areas of knowledge generation such as history, psychology, and cognitive science.
For example, William Whewell’s two volumes of Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840 set a precedent for arguing that there is more to scientific discovery than the creative moment known as the “happy thought.” According to Whewell, the happy thought only counts as discovery when it is followed by the pursuit and evaluation of the idea.
Today, there is broad agreement that a methodology of discovery can be constructed. Most advocates of such a methodology rely on the distinction between different justification procedures, with generative justification embracing the procedure of devising new hypotheses and consequential justification being the procedure of testing them (see Koertge 1980, section VIII). They may redraw the boundary between contexts of discovery and pursuit in order to retain only one creative act as discovery proper while adding a third context of conception.