Serendipity between psychology and logic of scientific discovery

The paradox of discovery, already foreshadowed by Heraclitus and resolved by Plato by the doctrine of anamnesis, 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 element leading to a discovery or invention. Creativity and (scientific) method seem to be, at least at first sight, opposing concepts, and as such are often used in everyday language, where, for example, the originality and lack of rules typical of creatively oriented minds is contrasted with the order and regularity with which methodically oriented minds proceed. This tension is brought to a more essential formulation in the 'paradox of control', according to which, on the one hand, serendipitous discoveries or inventions are accidental and unpredictable, but, on the other hand, can be prepared and learned. To solve this paradox, it is necessary to critically rethink both the acceptance of the (e.g. neo-positivist and Popperian) distinction between discovery and justification and its more recent rejection within the epistemological tradition. I propose a distinction between two senses – one transcendental, the other methodological – of the distinction between discovery and justification that may take away the paradoxical or even contradictory nature of these two aspects of serendipity and, more generally, scientific discovery.