?
Vague stimulating ideas, images and metaphors in scientific thinking: researchers' work with horizons of unclear knowledge
Clarity of knowledge and reasoning is necessary in many cases. Yet vagueness in scientific thinking related to surprise, curiosity, "ability to engage with not-knowing" (de Freitas) and abductive reasoning is also a crucially important source of scientific creativity which supplements combinatorial logic when dealing with the already known. Starting from studies by C. S. Peirce and B. Russell, scientists have developed tools for working with increasingly accurate knowledge and with vague concepts and operations in logic, mathematics and philosophy. Here I focus mainly on the psychological component: vague ideas, images and metaphors in scientific thinking and research, and how individuals subjectively experience these, reflect on them and generalise them. From the lens of general psychology, vagueness is an asset for dynamic pre-adaptation to new unexpected conditions (Valsiner). Vague concepts, images and metaphors in science are important because they can have the positive potential to open and expand horizons of future knowledge, and lead to deep existential and stimulating cognitive emotions (like Einstein's "something deeply hidden had to be behind things"). In terms of dynamic semiosis, they are essential to humans' work with dynamically changing fields of meanings in developing science. The article describes three stages of work with vague ideas, images and metaphors in science in the 20th-21st centuries (from researchers' self-descriptions to their generalizations and design of experiments provoking participants' vague ideas, and then to organizations of scientific institutions and societies) and presents diverse means to support researchers' work with vague ideas.
Language:
English