The Role of Intuitive Ontology, Constructivism, and Analogy in Creative Scientific Imagination

This paper provides an analysis of creative scientific imagination as the most important factor in the advancement of science in accordance to theoretical models and empirical findings of cognitive sciences. Most inductive inferences are intertwined with intuitive ontological relations; that is, they are not arrived at through reasoning. Intuitive ontology is a restricted categorical set, constituting theoretical frameworks. Scientific creativity is constructed by prior ontological expectations, and thus, the progress of science is owed to parting way from intuitive ontology. Analogies are powerful epistemic tools at the disposal of scientists to overcome such restrictions. Nevertheless, analogies are also affected by intuitive ontology, since they deploy analogies within the limits of their own minds. To deploy the repertoire within their creativity is to have constructed imagination. Thus, the progress of science is based on available body of knowledge, and the production of creative images is done in one way: to creatively bring about a discovery or an invention of certain familiar concepts. The relation between observation and theory in science is based on this construction via creative imagination, rather than a generalization of available models.