Selene Arfini

Serendipity is a concept that addresses a peculiar phenomenon in science: the act of finding or discovering something by chance or without looking for it. Since the beginning of this century, scholars have considered the convolute implications of serendipity, which have been at the center of an emerging area of research called Serendipity Science. One thing that has escaped scholarly attention is what serendipity offers us in terms of explanations. What kind of explanations does serendipity offer? And explanations of what? This article aims to answer these questions by focusing on the open problems related to serendipity and its capacity for explanation in science. In the first section, we will briefly discuss why serendipity appears problematic in the philosophy of science. In the second section, we will maintain that serendipity is a term that rightfully identifies at least two sets of explanatory reasoning: one that we have called the Prospective Explanation, given during the serendipitous process, and the Retrospective Explanation, which emerges only after the research is concluded. By discussing the difference between these two explanatory dynamics, we will illustrate that serendipity should be addressed by providing valuable information about why a discovery has emerged and how it is justified in the scientific context.

In this article, we want to demonstrate how thoughts experiments (TEs) incorporate cognitive structures—abductive inferences as conceptual metaphors—that reliably underpin everyday thinking and are enhanced and rendered more effective in scientific and philosophical contexts. Indeed one might successfully rethink the inferential structure at the heart of thought experiment production as the application of a generative abductive procedure. We shall characterize TES as possessing two characteristics that are essential to the definitions of abductive and metaphorical thinking, but when considered in relation to TE’s description, can excuse mild bewilderment: both knowledge-enhancing and ignorance-preserving features. In sum, we will say that TEs realize extended conceptual metaphors, which instantiate forms of abductive reasoning and, therefore, partially preserve the ignorance of the authors who produce them (even if they also increase a bit their knowledge by—so to speak—mitigating ignorance). In certain fortunate and exceptional instances, however, TEs can also provide a purely knowledge-enhancing benefit; in order to do this, a reference to the innovative and creative function of thought experiments in Galileo’s findings is also included.

How do we produce novel beliefs, concepts, or solutions? This chapter aims to offer an alternative understanding of creative cognition by shifting the investigative perspective from an internalist to an externalist view. We begin to answer the question of how a new thought is born by drawing connections between creative cognition and the notion of serendipity. This connection, we argue, redirects the focus of the inquiry to the essential role of the environment and human networks in not only the unfolding and temporally extended creative process but also the initial cognitive trigger. The first part of the chapter discusses psychological and philosophical trends in creative cognition research, describing the emerging perspectives on the extended, distributed, and embodied properties of creative reasoning. The second part describes serendipity as the outcome of unplanned actions directed by material changes in the environment, which, we suggest, can bring clarity to how creative cognition may emerge in soft-assembled cognitive systems. In the third part of the article, we exploit the concept of serendipity as an explanatory device. Indeed, we will make the strong argument that it describes essential features of creative cognition, which needs a distributed and extended mind perspective to be properly understood.