ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss various understandings of scientific discovery. The making of discoveries is what science is all about, the stuff of the scientific career and of scientific reputation. Two key authors in the scientific process have been Augustine Brannigan and Barry Barnes, who have developed the attributional model of scientific discovery. Barnes uses the example of the discovery of Neptune to illustrate some of the points about the nature of discovery. Philosophical approaches to discovery have divided on the question of the existence of a 'logic of scientific discovery'. Inductivist philosophies have generally been happy to treat their versions of scientific method as providing such logic. Hypotheticalism, rejects the idea of logic of discovery, leaving the process whereby theories are arrived at as the province of the 'irrational', that is, the psychological, sociological or historical. An attributional study of the water controversy involves identifying the texts in which attributions are made.
