Many philosophers have argued that scientific discovery is a kind of intuitive process that cannot be examined logically. One example is the discovery of oxygen: it was not possible to identify which one of several investigators (such as Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier) actually discovered oxygen. It is also difficult to pinpoint the moment at which a particular discovery was made. Such arguments often lead to the conclusion that the concept of discovery should be abandoned as a topic for philosophical investigation, although there has been a shift away from this view in recent years.
Some philosophers have responded to the context distinction by focusing on creative processes that are amenable to philosophical analysis. They argue that there is more to scientific discovery than a eureka moment and that the creativity that leads to discoveries must be distinguished from other elements of scientific inquiry. These philosophers have referred to William Whewell’s 1840 work, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, in which he proposed that scientific discovery begins with a “happy thought” or a creative intuition that is accidentally triggered by some other event. This intuition is not, however, a wild guess; as Whewell said, it is more like the previous condition of the mind that prepares it to notice an unexpected fact.
The second type of creativity involves developing and articulating tentative theories that guide further experimentation. These theories can then be used to make predictions about the behavior of new phenomena, which can be tested using experiments and observations. If the results confirm these predictions, the theory has been verified and the discovery is complete.