Dancing with Discovery

Putting things into categories is helpful.  Sometimes it lets you recognize shared commonalities between things that you didn’t notice before.  Other times it gives you a mental shortcut to know how to interact with something—once you know its category, you’re more likely to know what it’s for and what to do with it.

In the first Insight Exchange I recently hosted at my home institution I structured the process of scientific discovery into a five-phase cycle and I also structured the types of scientific discovery into four categories.  The purpose of this “typology” of scientific discovery was to help guide the conversation in the group.  I also had two hunches: (1) that scientists pursuing similar types of discoveries, even if they are from different fields, will share similar challenges and setbacks; and (2) that each category of scientific discovery has a set of associated strategies uniquely suited to making progress on that kind of discovery.

This idea of discovery categories and associated strategies is a keystone of my goal to build software that helps promotes scientific discovery.  As I work on finalizing a first evolution of a territory map of scientific discovery and strategies (to be released under Spark Points sometime later this year) I keep mulling over the questions: What distinguishes the types of scientific discoveries? And what strategies are most useful for what types of scientific discoveries?

As always, I’m looking for ways to answer these questions that work across a broad range of fields, not just physics.  For the Insight Exchange I used a four-category breakdown of types of scientific discoveries: object, attribute, mechanism, technique.  Each of these are labelled by the primary type of knowledge being sought, as described in the little list below.

 

CATEGORIES OF DISCOVERY

• OBJECT –
  • new object
• ATTRIBUTE –
  • new property of a known object
• MECHANISM –
  • new behavior or phenomenon, or explanation of a known behavior or phenomenon
• TECHNIQUE –
  • new tool or method to generate a known object, attribute, or mechanism

 

For example, in my own field of neutrino physics open questions related to each category would be:

 

EXAMPLES OF CATEGORIES OF DISCOVERY IN NEUTRINO PHYSICS

• OBJECT –
  • do additional neutrinos exist beyond the three known standard model (SM) ones?
• ATTRIBUTE –
  • does the neutrino have a non-zero magnetic moment?
• MECHANISM –
  • what is the origin of neutrino mass?
• TECHNIQUE –
  • how can you develop a detector capable of observing beyond the standard model (BSM) physics using coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS)?

 

So, in this classification of scientific discovery, it’s a little like playing a professional version of the childhood question game “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?”.

The group in the first Insight Exchange did not seem to take issue with my category labels too much, but many people felt their personal scientific discovery goal did not cleanly fit into one category and listed it as belonging to multiple categories.  So as a workshop strategy, this typology didn’t work out too well (since I had planned to put people into small teams grouped by their category, with the thought that they might share more of the same challenges and, therefore, be better positioned to offer each other feedback).  Best laid plans.  Instead, I ended up assigning teams completely differently (in such a way as to ensure a good diversity of scientific fields and career stages within each team).

So, I’ve gone back to the drawing board a little to keep thinking about this idea of types of scientific discovery.  So far, I’ve been struggling to find the words to yield the right material when doing a literature review search:  Is it “categories” of scientific discovery?  Is it “types”? A “typology of scientific discovery”?  Or maybe “the classification of scientific discoveries”?

My search remains unsuccessful to some degree, but I did find two very short writings that attempt to do the same thing.  The first is an editorial in Science magazine by a former editor of that publication, Daniel E. Koshland Jr. a professor of biochemistry and molecular and cell biology, entitled “The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery”.  Koshland’s theory is that historical patterns of scientific discovery (and non-scientific discoveries) suggest that discovery can be divided into three categories: charge, challenge, and chance.

In Koshland’s theory charge discoveries are about finding a solution to a well-known problem.  In the charge type of discovery, the discoverer’s primary role is to view the same data and context already well-known to all, but to come to some novel conclusion by perceiving that collection of facts in a way no other researcher has.  In the challenge type of discovery, the discoverer’s primary role is to bring cohesion and consistency to a body of well-known facts and/or anomalies that are in tension or lack a unifying conceptual framework.  Lastly, in the chance type of discovery, the discoverer’s role is to perceive and explain the central importance of a known or recently observed fact obtained by accident.  In his editorial, Koshland gives numerous examples of each type of discovery from fields as diverse as chemistry, physics, and biology.

More importantly, he extends his category theory to note an additional pattern:

“…the original contribution of the discoverer can be applied at different points in the solution of a problem.  In the Charge category, originality lies in the devising of a solution, not in the perception of the problem.  In the Challenge category, the originality is in perceiving the anomalies and their importance and devising a new concept that explains them.  In the Chance category, the original contribution is the perception of the importance of the accident and articulating the phenomenon on which it throws light.”

[D. E. Koshland, Science, vol. 137, p. 761 (2007)]

Before I do a little comparison of these different ways to categorize scientific discovery, let me also throw another article into the mix.  Keiichi Noe, a professor of philosophy at Tohoku University, wrote a contribution, entitled “The Structure of Scientific Discovery: From a Philosophical Point of View”, to a book on discovery science.  The actual focus of Noe’s paper is on the mental process by which discovery is achieved and how this might be translated into a computational algorithm.  But to elucidate such strategies, Noe first defines two types of discovery.

For Noe, one type of scientific discovery is “factual discovery”, the “discovery of a new fact guided by an established theory” (p.33).  In contrast, the second type of discovery is a “conceptual discovery”, “which [proposes] systematic explanations of…phenomena by reinterpreting pre-existing facts and laws from a new point of view” (p.33).  In Noe’s framework, the significance of these distinctions is that the scientist must bring a different kind of thought process, in particular a different implementation of the imagination, to the pursuit of each kind of discovery.  For factual discovery what Noe calls a “metonymical imagination” is needed; whereas, for conceptual discovery a “metaphorical imagination” is needed.

In the case of the discovery of new facts, the metonymical imagination refers to a way of thinking in which newly discovered items that are closely related, as seen through the lens of existing theory, are grouped together.  As Noe puts it these “discoveries…complete an unfinished theory” (p. 37).  In contrast, in the case of the discovery of essentially new theory, the metaphorical imagination refers to a way of thinking in which hidden or implied links are created between unrelated items that share common characteristics.  In these discoveries “[a change of] viewpoint from explicit facts to implicit unknown relations [occurs]” (p.37).

If we use the five-phase discovery cycle (question-ideation-articulation-evaluation-verification) as a common grounding point, then these three different typologies of scientific discovery—my quartet, Koshland’s trio, and Noe’s duo—each represent a different way of thinking about the discovery cycle.  For me, the discovery classifications emphasize the type of output desired by the discoverer at the end of the discovery cycle (i.e., after successful verification)—is it an object, a description, an explanation, or a method.  For Koshland the emphasis is on the point at which the discoverer must innovate within the discovery cycle in order to discover something new—either ideation (charge and challenge discoveries) or articulation (chance discoveries).  For Noe, the emphasis is on the overarching viewpoint and mindset that the discoverer applies in moving through the entire cycle—do you use the prevailing view or replace it.

It’s also easy to see that depending on which typology of scientific discovery you use, you will also perceive different strategies and techniques as more useful.  Within my typology, mathematical and logical strategies are better suited to mechanism discoveries, building and prototyping strategies to techniques, and a mix of both to object and attribute discoveries.  For Koshland, strategies that boost ideation or streamline articulation will simultaneously advance discovery.  Noe has explicitly defined useful tactics, the metonymical imagination for factual discovery and metaphorical imagination for conceptual discovery.

Which brings me to the end of my musings for this week.  Some weeks, coming up with an image that sums up my new perspective on scientific discovery is incredibly challenging.  But this week Koshland has made it easy for me:

If scientific discovery is a kind of dance, wherein the dancers become more skilled and graceful with time, producing ever more intricate choreographies of knowledge, then typologies of scientific discovery are merely styles of dance that one can practice.  For me it’s a kind of folksy American square dance or mannered English quadrille, for Koshland a vibrant Cuban cha-cha, and for Noe a delicate French pas de deux from ballet.  But whatever your style for dancing with discovery, knowing the kind of dance you’re in just might help you improve your moves.