Discovery in the lab: Plato's paradox and Delbruck's principle of limited sloppiness

Abstract

Towards the beginning of his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Sir Karl Popper reminds readers that there is no logic to how discoveries begin. The question how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man—whether it is a musical theme, a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory—may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. This latter is concerned . . . only with questions of justification or validity (1). In short, the scientific method is a method to justify and validate new ideas, not a method by which new ideas can be generated. However, for those of us practicing science, generating new ideas (novelty) is central to what we hope to accomplish. We aim for new-search not re-search. It is new-search that advances our understanding of how the world works. Although in high demand, novelty also is hard to accomplish. Funding agencies hope to support creative, innovative research, but judging the potential for novelty is difficult. Consequently, review groups tend to focus instead on feasibility—the likelihood of success in justification and validation of new ideas. The Greek philosopher Plato argued that true novelty is impossible to achieve. In the Dialogues, Plato has Meno ask Socrates: How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? And Socrates answers: I know what you want to say, Meno . . . that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for (2). The interchange above between Meno and Socrates— Plato’s paradox—helps explain just why discovery is so hard to accomplish. If a researcher seeks and finds what he already knows how to look for and recognize, then nothing new has been discovered. On the other hand, how can he look for what he does not know how to recognize? In practical terms, consider experimental design. Designing any experiment requires guessing “what and when” might be the outcome. Consequently, results inevitably will be biased in the direction of one’s “what and when” expectations. We tend to find precisely that for which we are looking. Aristotle dismissed the dilemma posed by Meno and argued in Book I of Posterior Analytics that, “there is nothing to prevent a man in one sense knowing what he is learning, and in another not knowing it (3)”. As Michael Polanyi put it, “we know more that we can tell”—the tacit domain of knowledge (4). Discovery means getting in touch with that domain. Albert SzentGyorgyi described this path to discovery as seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought. Rene Magritte’s 1936 painting Perspicacity provides an artful example. The artist stares at a solitary egg resting on a draped table. On his canvas, he paints a bird in full flight.

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