The Value of Surprise in Science

Abstract

Scientific results are often presented as ‘surprising’ as if that is a good thing. Is it? And if so, why? What is the value of surprise in science? Discussions of surprise in science have been limited, but surprise has been used as a way of defending the epistemic privilege of experiments over simulations. The argument is that while experiments can ‘confound’, simulations can merely surprise (Morgan, 2005). Our aim in this paper is to show that the discussion of surprise can be usefully extended to thought experiments and theoretical derivations. We argue that in focusing on these features of scientific practice, we can see that the surprise-confoundment distinction does not fully capture surprise in science. We set out how thought experiments and theoretical derivations can bring about surprises that can be disruptive in a productive way, and we end by exploring how this links with their future fertility.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	French, S Murphy, A
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: April 2023 Published (online): 30 July 2021 Accepted: 22 March 2021
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	29 Mar 2021 10:58
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2023 22:37
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Identification Number:	10.1007/s10670-021-00410-z
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:172599

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The Value of Surprise in Science

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