This is the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments.

Scientific understanding as a subject of inquiry has become widely discussed in philosophy of science and is often addressed through case studies from history of science. Even though these historical reconstructions engage with details of scientific practice, they usually provide only limited information about the gradual formation of understanding in ongoing processes of model and theory construction. Based on a qualitative ethnographic study of an ecological research project, this article shifts attention from understanding in the context of historical case studies (...) to evidence of current case studies. By taking de Regt’s contextual theory of scientific understanding into the field, it confirms core tenets of the contextual theory suggesting a normative character with respect to scientific activities. However, the case study also shows the limitations of de Regt’s latest version of this theory as an attempt to explain the development of understanding in current practice. This article provides a model representing the emergence of scientific understanding that exposes main features of scientific understanding such as its gradual formation, its relation to skills and imagination, and its capacity for knowledge selectivity. The ethnographic evidence presented here supports the claim that something unique can be learned by looking into ongoing research practices that can’t be gained by studying historical case studies. (shrink)

In this paper, we show how the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey sheds new light on traditional models of creativity in science. In particular, the example illustrates where both the enlightenment and the romantic view on creativity go astray. In the first section, we sketch the two views and present a list of problems for both. In the remainder of the paper, we demonstrate how William Harvey’s discovery, as a historical case study of creativity in (...) science, gives firmer ground to these objections. (shrink)