ABSTRACT
You may be surprised that the discussion of discovery should occur at this late stage in the book. After all, does discovery not come before dialogue and replication, and should it not, therefore, have provided our point of departure? My reason for placing the analysis of this topic here is that the apparent temporal priority of discovery is something of an illusion. It is an illusion in the sense that discovery is socially accomplished over time, sometimes over surprisingly long periods of time, and is interpretatively projected backwards upon earlier events. Specific events, actions or texts are revealed to be discoveries by the routine interpretative work embedded in informal dialogue, debate over replicability, and so on. The social construction of discovery is a facet of scientists’ continuing discourse; and discovery is best seen, not as something which sets scientific discourse in motion, but as an interpretative outcome of that discourse.
