Finding: The Key to Discovery

Andreas Bartels

The aim of my talk is to provide an outlook to a theory of scientific discovery with finding as the key notion. I take finding to entail more than encountering, but less than discovering. I thereby propose a „thick“ notion of finding possessing epistemic weight on its own, and try to figure out what would constitute this epistemic weight. It turns out that imagination, anticipation and what I call „instructive ignorance“ are main constituents of finding. The analysis of finding will pave the way, or so I hope, to a theory of scientific discovery that – contrary to some existing approaches to scientific discovery – would be, on the one hand, comprehensive enough to explain the various phenomena that accompany scientific discoveries in a variety of cases, and, on the other hand, also specific enough in order to account for the substantial difference between discovery and invention. Finally, I illustrate my analysis of finding by the example of Einstein’s early finding of the Equivalence Principle.