科学发现的本质及其逻辑机制的再发现

Re-discovery of the Nature and Logic of Scientific Discovery

不管对科学发现进行语义分析,还是对科学发现活动本身进行历史探究,我们都会发现,科学发现除了具有社会、历史和心理上的属性外,它在本质上乃是新假说的产生、选择、修正、接受和解释的逻辑过程,其逻辑机制正是皮尔士与汉森等所倡导的溯因推理。而且,现代认知科学的新成果促进了溯因推理形式的不断完善,人们意识到在新假说产生与选择中背景理论与背景知识的重要作用,创新了溯因推理的推理形式,令人满意地回答了溯因推理何以能够以及如何能够成为科学发现的逻辑的问题。

Analyzing scientific discovery semantically, or researching the activities of scientific discovery themselves historically, we will find that, despite the social, historical, and psychological properties, scientific discovery is actually a logical process of generating, choosing, revising, receiving and interpreting new hypothesis, the logical mechanism is just abduction advocated by Charles S. Peirce and Norwood R. Hansen etc. Moreover, it is the new achievement of modern cognitive science that makes it clear that background theories and knowledge play an important role in the course of hypothesis generation and selection, and promotes innovation of the forms of abduction, thus, the questions why and how abduction can become the logical mechanism of scientific discovery is answered satisfactorily.