Heuristic Reasoning

Scientific discovery is treated here as something that can be studied, judged and refined. The book asks which methods drive new findings, how such findings can be assessed and reconstructed in a rational way so that the process of discovery improves over time, and whether lessons drawn from this work can guide decisions about research funding so that discoveries have a greater effect on society.

The chapters take up several connected problems. They present models of revolutionary findings and of paradigm shifts, and they examine how reasoning can respond when a groundbreaking result divides the scientific community. Other chapters propose frameworks for both discovery and inference, and they explore heuristics applied to economics and the social sciences.