One of the central issues in philosophical reflection on scientific discovery is how new knowledge is first conceived. Early seventeenth and eighteenth-century treatises on scientific inquiry included a variety of theories that attempted to analyze the patterns of successful discovery. The distinction between the generation of new ideas and their validation has proved crucial to contemporary debates on scientific discovery. As philosophers have become increasingly attuned to actual scientific practices, interest in heuristic strategies for the initial adoption, articulation, and evaluation of a novel idea or hypothesis before rigorous testing has been revived.
Many scholars, however, have argued that the traditional syllogistic logic used in philosophy of science is not suited to the study of discoveries because of the fundamental differences between the two processes. They have therefore defended a narrower notion of discovery as an intuitive, unanalyzable leap that cannot be described by means of any logical rules.
A second line of argument has been based on the work of Thomas Kuhn, who argues that the emergence of novel facts and theories is a consequence of the articulation, development, extension, and modification of existing paradigms. According to this view, scientists are not engaged in discovery so much as in a search for truth; instead, they are engaged in a struggle to accommodate anomalous phenomena within the confines of existing paradigms.
The third line of response to the context distinction focuses on the fact that scientific discovery involves a creative thought. It has been argued that such thinking can be analyzed by combining traditional logical analysis with information from the empirical sciences such as cognitive science, psychology, and sociology.