On the Thinking Process in a Scientist’s Research Work

Abstract

In this work, we only used material from experimental research. We focused this study on elementary thinking processes in problem-solving in order to identify the general patterns of elementary thought processes. It would be very important, of course, to compare the results we obtained with the data on the thinking process of a scientist who is trying to solve some serious scientific problem. But it is hard to make a scientist’s thinking while he is occupied with his investigation the subject of experimentation. Here we have to take a different path—the path of analyzing the documentation in which the course of his musings would have been objectively recorded. Thanks to precisely dated documentary data presented in B.M. Kedrov’s study “On the Question of the Psychology of Research Work (Regarding D.M. Mendeleev’s Discovery of the Periodic Law)” [“K voprosu o psikhologii nauchnogo tvorchestva (po povodu otkrytiia D.M. Mendeleevym periodicheskogo zakona)”], it is possible to analyze Mendeleev’s line of thinking that led him to the discovery of the periodic law. In view of the interest aroused by an analysis of the scientist’s line of thinking and a comparison of the results of the analysis with our data, it makes sense to include this exploration in this work. Considering the variety of the material that this study uses in regard to the experimental material of our principal study, we decided to put it into a separate appendix. An analysis of the dated documentation uncovered by Kedrov makes it possible to reconstruct as follows Mendeleev’s line of thinking that led him to the discovery of the periodic law. During a lengthy period (about fifteen years) that preceded the discovery of the periodic system (and in particular, on February 17, 1869—the date when the first table of elements found by Kedrov was constructed), Mendeleev