Scientific discovery involves a broad range of processes – the articulation and development of a happy thought, the verification of a new idea, and the adoption of an idea in the scientific community. These processes are more amenable to philosophical analysis than is the eureka moment itself.
Until the late 20th century, nearly all philosophers operated with a notion of discovery that is narrower than Whewell’s. This view held that the eureka moment, narrowly construed, is an unanalyzable creative act of a gifted genius, such as the one by which Lavoisier identified oxygen.
Alternative conceptions of discovery emphasize that the discovery process is extended and includes the reasoning processes through which a new insight is articulated and developed, and that there is a systematic, formal aspect to this reasoning. Proponents of these theories have expounded rich accounts of the methodologies of science and proper scientific reasoning, ranging from the role of the senses in knowledge generation, through observation and experiment, to analysis and synthesis, induction and deductive logic, and hypotheses.
As philosophers have become more attuned to actual scientific practices, interest in heuristic strategies of problem solving has been revived. Many analysts have concluded that there is a distinctive pattern of reasoning in scientific discovery that may be characterized by rules, although it remains to be seen whether this will prove to be an analyzable rule set or merely a rough-and-ready heuristic.
Some scholars have also sought to demystify the process of discovery by combining philosophical analyses of discovery with information from empirical sciences, such as cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology, that address the nature of human cognition. These approaches have included recasting the context distinction by recognizing that scientific research is sometimes a heuristic, and thus by separating the two contexts of pursuit and justification, even though there are some cases in which it may be impossible to draw an exact boundary between them.