Serendipity, Creativity, and Method in Scientific Research

Method and creativity seem to be, at least at first sight, opposing concepts. The problem has recently been taken up again in the discussion around serendipity, i.e. the phenomenon in which a fortuitous and unexpected experience turns out to be an essential ingredient of a discovery or invention. How can chance be essential to research conducted methodically? The two essential ingredients of chance and method give rise to what, in the discussion on serendipity, has been called the paradox of control: the concept in question invokes chance and luck and at the same time proposes itself as a kind of method, capable of leading to ever new discoveries or inventions. To solve this paradox, it is necessary to critically rethink both the acceptance of the logical empiricist distinction between discovery and justification and its more recent rejection within the epistemological tradition. I propose a distinction between two senses – reflexive-transcendental and genetic-methodological – of the discovery/justification dichotomy that may dissolve the paradoxical nature of serendipity. From this point of view, an empirical discovery always moves from accidental and contingent conditions (which as such are not only unplanned but also independent of us) to the formulation of a new question to which those same conditions, now transformed into essential constituents of a thought experiment, provide an intersubjectively reproducible and testable answer.