Vague Stimulating Ideas, Images and Metaphors in Scientific Thinking: Researchers’ Work with Horizons of Unclear Knowledge

Abstract

Clarity of knowledge and reasoning is necessary in many cases. Yet vagueness in scientific thinking related to surprise, curiosity, and "ability to engage with not-knowing" (de Freitas) is also a crucially important source of scientific creativity. Starting from studies by C. S. Peirce and B. Russell, scientists have developed tools for working with increasingly accurate knowledge and with vague knowledge and operations. Here I focus mainly on the psychological component: vague ideas, images and metaphors in scientific thinking, and how individuals subjectively experience these, reflect on them and generalise them. From the lens of general psychology, vagueness is an asset for dynamic pre-adaptation to new unexpected conditions (Valsiner). Vague concepts, images and metaphors in science are important because they can have the positive potential to open horizons of future knowledge, and lead to deep existential and stimulating cognitive emotions (like Einstein's "something deeply hidden had to be behind things"). In terms of dynamic semiosis, they are essential to humans' work with dynamically changing fields of meanings in developing science. Three conceptualizations describe a fundamentally similar psychological reality of the development of thinking in the cognition of new areas: (a) "pulsation" between vague uncertainty and clear certainty in the development of scientific knowledge (Yulov); (b) mutual transitions between "day" and "night" science (Jacob; Yanai & Lercher); (c) mutual transitions between clear and unclear knowledge in children's thinking (N. Poddiakov). The article describes three stages of work with vague ideas, images and metaphors in science in the 20th-21st centuries and presents diverse means to support researchers' work with vague ideas.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2026 · DOI ↗