Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

Amihud Gilead

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-41124-4_4

Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

Amihud Gilead

Department of Philosophy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

What can we discover? As the discussion in this Chapter is limited to ontological considerations, it does not deal with the discovery of new concepts. It raises the following question: What are the entities or existents that we can discover? There are two kinds of such entities: (1) actual entities and (2) possible entities, which are individual pure possibilities. The Chapter explains why the first kind of discovery depends primarily on the second kind. The Chapter illustrates the discoveries of individual pure possibilities by presenting examples such as the Higgs particle, Dirac’s positron, and Pauli-Fermi’s neutrino.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Synthese Library
Publisher	Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Pages	37-57
Number of pages	21
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41124-4_4
State	Published - 2020

Publication series

Name	Synthese Library
Volume	424
ISSN (Print)	0166-6991
ISSN (Electronic)	2542-8292

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

History and Philosophy of Science
History
Language and Linguistics
Logic

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-030-41124-4_4

Cite this

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Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

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