From tools to theories: A heuristic of discovery in cognitive psychology.

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Abstract
The study of scientific discovery—where do new ideas come from?—has long been denigrated by phi- losophers as irrelevant to analyzing the growth of scientific knowledge. In particular, little is known about how cognitive theories are discovered, and neither the classical accounts of discovery as either probabilistic induction (e.g., Reichenbach, 1938) or lucky guesses (e.g., Popper, 1959), nor the stock anecdotes about sudden "eureka" moments deepen the insight into discovery. A heuristics approach is taken in this review, where heuristics are understood as strategies of discovery less general than a sup- posed unique logic of discovery but more general than lucky guesses. This article deals with how scien- tists' tools shape theories of mind, in particular with how methods of statistical inference have turned into metaphors of mind. The tools-to-theories heuristic explains the emergence of a broad range of cog- nitive theories, from the cognitive revolution of the 1960s up to the present, and it can be used to detect both limitations and new lines of development in current cognitive theories that investigate the mind as an "intuitive statistician."

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