Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

Abstract

What can we discover? As the discussion in this paper is limited to ontological considerations, it does not deal with the discovery of new concepts. It raises the following question: What are the entities or existents that we can discover? There are two kinds of such entities: (1) actual entities and (2) possible entities, which are pure possibilities. The paper explains why the first kind of discovery depends primarily on the second kind. The paper illustrates the discoveries of individual pure possibilities by presenting examples such as the Higgs particle, Dirac's positron, and Pauli-Fermi's neutrino.