CREATIVE PROCESSES IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

At present, computational models of scientific discovery and theory formation play a prominent role in illuminating transformations of rational conceptual systems. A new abstraction paradigm aimed at unifying the different perspectives and providing insight for future ones is proposed here. The aim is to emphasize the significance of “abduction” in order to propose a unified epistemological model of scientific discovery. This model first describes four meanings of the word abduction (creative, selective, visual, inference to the best explanation) in order to clarify their significance in epistemology and “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). Among the different abductive roles played by various kinds of conceptual transformations in developing scientific creative reasoning–such as radical ontological change, conceptual combination, analogical and visual thinking, anomaly resolution, thought experiment — visual mental imagery in thinking may be relevant to “scientific” hypothesis generation.