2.5 THE IDEA OF HEURISTICS AND DEDUCTION

Llull was interested in finding out new truths as well as proving -i.e. being able to convince anyone of- old ones. The last part is subsumed in what we ordinarily call deduction. The first one ("finding") is somewhat amazing, though. Modern science has systematically eschewed the analysis of why we discover or invent things. This has been attributed to imagination, to brilliancy or even to serendipity, but nobody has tried to explain, and in no way control, how the heuristic process develops. One reason for that is that we can only "control" it a posteriori, once the idea has arisen: we can then verify whether the predictions it makes turn out to be true or not. This simple reason was clearly stated by Popper in the 1950's during his dispute with Carnap and the idea of "inductive logic". Besides this, there is nothing we have today to find out new ideas except some magnificent insights into the creative process by Polya and others, and a very short collection of hints or rules-of-thumb for systematic exploration, be this Fred Zwicky's "morphological" method (an exhaustive combinatorial association) or its more modern computer-oriented counterparts in Artificial Intelligence (complete with more or less ad hoc techniques we AI-ers pretentiously call "heuristics"). What catches the eye most is that a thorough-modern method as Zwicky's, with its exploratory and pairing algorithms and tables, is strikingly similar, even in its outside appearance and paraphernalia, to the visual tools of Llull's. Needless to say, Heuristics as a science (if it ever was one) is nowadays in the same sorry state in which Llull found it.