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the discovery of a fact
 

...A great deal of what has proved most valuable to us is the gift of chance. Chemistry owes much to the blind puttering carried on in the shops of craftsmen, and in the laboratories of gentlemen-chemists of the eighteenth century, when it was fashionable to know something about “the new kind of air” and the subtle fluid phlogiston. The greatest advances in biology and medicine sprang from nothing but ordinary vision — through a compound microscope. The discovery of a fact may automatically interpret phenomena which baffle intuition.

ex Frederick Anderson (Stanford University), “Intuition,” in The Journal of Philosophy 23:14 (July 8, 1926) : 365-377 (376) : link

also by Frederick Anderson —
“On the Nature of Meaning,” The Journal of Philosophy 30 (1930) : 212–218
 

5 October 2022