Dear Tim,
I am cool with your account of discovery and where one might fit it into a model of research.
Over the years the group has spent quite a bit of time looking at SEARCH versus RESEARCH - this distinction would seem to be part of the DISCOVERY versus RESEARCH issue.
Ken's recent account of his dog discovering a mathematical solution is an eloquent statement of the problem at the level of the one who discovers something. That is, learning often evidences a typical discovery moment. As a affect of learning, discovery can be seen to promote the subsequent stages of knowledge that might then be seen to climax in research.
As an affect of learning, discovery then becomes a slippery marker of possible novelty/originality leading to new knowledge. We can wrongly mistake our affect for a truth marker when it is merely the marker of our personal insight (another kind of truth).
However, without the affect of discover (Eureka!) we can pass over things that are genuinely novel. Pointing to undisclosed novelty is (as I see it) one of the functions of a PhD supervisor. It can be disappointing to a candidate when they realize that they have disclosed something novel but they have failed to recognize their disclosure as an experience of knowing something genuinely new.
In this sense, research is an artificial science - we have to be trained to have the emotions (affects) of research just as actors have to be trained to have the emotions of characters they are portraying.
cheers from my quiet Easter
keith
>>> Tim Smithers <[log in to unmask]> 03/29/13 11:24 AM >>>
Dear David and Keith,
When you, David, write, and you, Keith, agree with
"We invent new ways of doing things. Sometimes we repeat
our ways of doing things. After repeating them for a few
times we articulate this way of doing things as a rule
which can be applied more widely. But then we discover
that the breadth of the application of the rule is limited.
Also, we like to break rules or flout them, and make new
rules. We also find that some rules are worth keeping, at
least for a while, because they seem to work in the context
we apply them. But all rules are subject to change."
what I would say you write of is discovery, and not of what I
would call research. It is discovery of new knowledge and
understanding, but not, I would say, of the same kind that
research results in.
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