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What constitutes a scientific discovery? Which role do discoveries play in science, its dynamics and social practices? Must every discovery be attributed to an individual discoverer (or a small number of discoverers)?
The presentation explores these questions by first critically examining extant philosophical explications of scientific discovery—the models of scientific discovery, propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As a simple, natural and powerful alternative, I proffer the “change-driver model”: in a nutshell, it takes discoveries to be cognitive scientific results that have epistemically advanced science. The model overcomes the shortcomings of its precursors, whilst preserving their insights. I demonstrate its intensional and extensional superiority, especially with respect to the link between scientific discoveries and the dynamics of
science, as well as the award system of science.
Both as an illustration, and as an application to a recent controversy, with science-political import, I finally apply the considered models of discovery to one of the most momentous discoveries of science: the expansion of the universe. I oppose the 2018 proposal of the International Astronomers’ Union as too simplistic vis-`a-vis the historical complexity of the episode. The change-driver model yields a more nuanced and circumspect verdict: (i) The redshift-distance relation shouldn’t be named the “Hubble-Lemaˆıtre Law”, but “Slipher-Lundmark-Hubble-Humason Law”; (ii) Its interpretation in terms of an expanding universe, however, Lemaˆıtre ought to be given credit for; but (iii) The establishment of the expansion of the universe, as an evidentially sufficiently warranted result, is a communal achievement,
emerging in the 1950s or 1960s.
Keywords: Discovery, Kuhn, theory dynamics, progress, expansion of the univers