This article is concerned with one of the notable but forgotten research strands that developed out of French nineteenth-century positivism, a strand that turned attention to the study of scientific discovery and was actively pursued by French epistemologists around the turn of the nineteenth century. I first sketch the context in which this research program emerged. I show that the program was a natural offshoot of French neopositivism; the latter was a current of twentieth-century thought that, even if implicitly, challenged (...) the positivism of first-generation positivists such as Comte. I then survey what French epistemologists—including Ernest Naville, Élie Rabier, Pierre Duhem, Édouard Le Roy, Abel Rey, André Lalande, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Edmond Goblot, and Jacques Picard, among others—had to say about the logic, psychology, and sociology of discovery. My story demonstrates the inaccuracy of existing historical accounts of the philosophical study of scientific discovery. (shrink)

En sus Principios de biología de 1864, Spencer esboza una complementación entre el cuvierianismo transformacional mitigado que daba sentido a la idea de equilibración directa ahí presentada, y la teoría de la selección natural que Darwin ya había formulado en 1859. Era a este último mecanismo que Spencer denominaba "equilibración indirecta". Según Spencer, esta segunda forma de equilibración permitía explicar fenómenos evolutivos que la primera, la equilibración directa, no podía causar; aunque para él también era evidente que el accionar de (...) esa segunda equilibración debía siempre subordinarse al control de la primera. In his Principles of Biology, published in 1864, Spencer outlines a complementarity between the mitigated transformational cuvierianism that was in the basis of his idea of direct equilibration, and the theory of the natural selection that Darwin had already formulated in 1859. Spencer called the mechanism of natural selection indirect equilibration. According to him, this second form of equilibration enabled the explanation of some evolutionary phenomena that could not be caused by direct equilibration. However, for Spencer, it was clear that the operation of this second equilibration had to be always subordinated to the control of the first one. (shrink)