COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF DISCOVERY IN SLA

This paper addresses an important part of theory construction, the production of new ideas, teat is, the process of discovery, in order to determine what value insights from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science might have for the emerging discipline of SLA. We recognize the current conflict between those who espouse the rationality of science and those who point to social forces and personal motives as causal agents in the process of discovery. We present a case that endorses the role of reasoning in discovery and which accepts the need for social mechanisms appealing to the interests of individual scientists in order to explain how rationality flourishes. We give particular attention to a set of reasoning strategies for generating hypotheses, identified by Darden (1991), and illustrate them with examples from SLA, where possible, and neighboring fields. We proceed to argue that a plausible social explanation for the centrality of reasoning is that the institution of science has evolved in such a way that its interests coincide with the interests of individual scientists, an account which is based primarily on the work of Hull (1988). Again, we indicate possible implications for the new field of second language acquisition.