Abstract
The enterprise that I am undertaking here has been severely discouraged by contemporary philosophers. They do not deny that the imagination can produce new ideas which help the pursuit of science or that our personal hunches and intuitions are often to the point. But since our imagination can roam unhindered by argument and our intuitions cannot be accounted for, neither imagination nor intuition are deemed rational ways of making discoveries. They are excluded from the logic of scientific discovery, which can deal then only with the verification or refutation of ideas after they have turned up as possible contributions to science.
Reprinted from Chemical and Engineering News 44 (1966): 85-93. @ 1966 American Chemical Society.
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Notes
See H. Dingle, The Scientific Adventure (London: Pitman, 1952), p. 46.
See F.W. Snyder and N.H. Pronko, Vision with Spatial Inversion (Wichita: University of Wichita Press, 1952).
For fuller evidence and its interpretation in the sense given here, see H. Kottenhoff, “Was ist richtiges Sehen mit Umkehrbrillen and in welchem Sinne stellt sich das Sehen um?,” Psychologia Universalis 5 (1961).
See P.A. Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist (New York: Tudor, 1951), p. 53.
See A. Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (New York: Knopf, 1963), pp. 378–385.
See R.F. Hefferline et al, “Escape and Avoidance Conditioning in Human Subjects Without Their Observation of the Response,” Science 130 (1959): 1338–1339.
R.F. Hefferline, “Learning Theory in Clinical Psychology,” in Experimental Foundations of Clinical Psychology, ed. A.J. Bachrach (New York: Basic Books, 1962).
See Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (London: Hutchinson, 1959).
Ibid., p. 334.
Ibid., p. 316.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 150–160.
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961).
See Schilpp, op. cit., p. 49.
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© 1981 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague
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Polanyi, M. (1981). The Creative Imagination. In: Dutton, D., Krausz, M. (eds) The Concept Of Creativity Science Art. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8230-7_5
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