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Discoveries and The Emergence of New Fields in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Lindley Darden
Lindley Darden*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Extract

Understanding the growth of scientific knowledge is a central problem in philosophy of science today, a part of which takes the form of understanding how new knowledge arises and how it becomes unified with existing knowledge. As a way of tackling this problem, one may ask: how do new fields arise in science? And how is the knowledge in a new field related to that in other fields?

In recent work I characterized a scientific field as an area of science consisting of the following elements: a central problem, a domain of items taken to be facts related to that problem, general explanatory factors and goals providing expectations as to how the problem is to be solved, techniques and methods, and concepts, laws and theories related to the problem which attempt to realize the explanatory goals (p. 44). Also in that work, my coauthor and I discussed interfield theories which serve to link two fields by postulating specific kinds of relations between them.

Type
Part IV. Case Studies with Applications to the Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 149 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This work was supported by NSF Grant SOC 77-23476. I wish to thank Nancy Maull, Frederick Suppe, Stephen Brush, Dudley Shapere, Kevin Mutchler and Jane Voytek for comments on an earlier draft.

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