Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel Meets Kuhn

Samuel Schindler

Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel Meets Kuhn

T0 review · 1 major / 0 minor · reviewed 2026-08-04 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read All 33 natural-kind discoveries recognized by Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1972 to 2024 fall into two classes — observations that are later conceptualized and predictions that are later observed — and all but one received a prize only after

desk verdict A serious first attempt to test Kuhn's two-type discovery taxonomy against Nobel Physics, with honest reporting but a classification scheme that is less robust than its 'fully confirmed' language suggests. read the letter →

arxiv 2510.09069 v1 pith:HVIDFP7C submitted 2025-10-10 physics.hist-ph

Samuel Schindler This is my paper · ORCID

classification physics.hist-ph

keywords scientificdiscoverynaturalkindsthat-whatwhat-thatNobelPrizeinPhysicscreditattributiontheoryandexperimentKuhn

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper asks whether an old philosophical distinction between two kinds of scientific discovery holds up against the most celebrated discoveries in physics. Analyzing the 33 Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1972 to 2024 that recognized new natural kinds or their properties, the author finds that all of them fall into either 'that-what' discoveries — a surprising phenomenon is observed first and only later correctly conceptualized — or 'what-that' discoveries — a theoretically predicted phenomenon is then observed. The author also finds that, with one exception, no prize was awarded before an at least partially correct conceptualization of the discovered phenomenon existed. On this basis, the paper draws a normative conclusion: the Nobel Committee's strong preference for honoring experimental over theoretical contributions systematically under-credits the conceptual half of discovery.

What carries the argument

The central machinery is Kuhn's distinction between 'that-what' and 'what-that' discoveries, paired with the premise that a natural-kind discovery requires a correct but not necessarily complete conceptualization of the observed phenomenon. The analysis classifies each Nobel Prize by recording when the observation ('that') and the correct concept ('what') first appeared, then cross-checks the classification against the Nobel Foundation's own descriptive texts. This machinery also produces two derived measures: the time lag between observation and conceptualization, and the time from completion of the discovery to the award, which together are used to test claims about epistemic uncertainty.

What would settle it

A single Nobel Prize in Physics between 1972 and 2024 awarded for a natural-kind discovery that, by the paper's own criteria, lacked any at least partially correct conceptualization before the award (other than the cited high-temperature superconductor case), or a natural-kind discovery that fits neither the that-what nor the what-that pattern, would overturn the central claim.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The paper claims that Kuhn's two-type taxonomy of natural-kind discovery, when stripped of its surrounding revolutionary framework, accurately describes every natural-kind discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in Physics over the past 53 years. A 'that-what' discovery starts with an unexpected observation that requires a new or revised concept; a 'what-that' discovery starts with a theoretical prediction that is later confirmed by observation. Of the 33 qualifying discoveries, 19 were that-what and 14 were what-that. The paper further claims that in all but one case the prize was not awarded before an at least partially correct conceptualization of the discovered phenomenon existed, and that N

Load-bearing premise

That each discovery has a single, stable classification determined by whether the correct concept or the first observation appeared first in print, independent of who later received the prize or of how the Nobel Committee framed the award.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

If the account is correct, the 19/14 split shows that the most prestigious physics prizes recognize both revolutionary surprises and predicted confirmations in comparable numbers, undermining the idea that Nobel-level discovery is mostly about unexpected breakthroughs.
The finding that that-what discoveries wait a median of 20 years for the prize while what-that discoveries wait 7 supports the claim that epistemic uncertainty about a new phenomenon delays its community acceptance and recognition.
The normative conclusion that a discovery consists of both observation and conceptualization implies that awards honoring only experimentalists or only theoreticians leave half of the discovery uncredited, and this under-crediting appears in both discovery types.
The sole counterexample, the 1987 high-temperature superconductor prize, suggests the correctness requirement can be relaxed when the new phenomenon is an extension of a well-understood kind, narrowing the scope of the claim but not overturning it.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

If the type of a discovery is fixed by who published first rather than by the discovery's intrinsic epistemic structure, then the same event — as with the positron — can be a 'that-what' discovery for one team and a 'what-that' discovery for another; in that case the taxonomy describes credit conventions and publication races more than it describes a stable feature of discovery.
The author's own numbers show that half of what-that discoveries were also described as revolutionary, which is a direct challenge to the clean mapping between discovery type and revolutionary status that originally motivated the distinction.
A natural next test is to apply the same classification to Nobel Prizes in Chemistry or Physiology/Medicine; if the two-type taxonomy holds there, it would strengthen the claim that Kuhn's distinction captures something general about natural-kind discovery rather than a quirk of physics prize practices.
The normative argument could be operationalized as a practical reform: prize committees could be required to name both the 'first observer' and the 'first correct conceptualizer' of a discovery, ensuring that both the experimental and theoretical halves receive credit.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

Dear colleague,

The short version: Schindler has done something nobody else has done - systematically coded 53 years of Nobel Physics citations as instances of Kuhn's two discovery types and tested five hypotheses derived from his own earlier account. The empirical core is the 19 vs 14 split, the 100%/93% surprise profiles, and the 20-vs-7-year award lag. Those numbers are internally consistent, and the paper is honest about its anomalies (NP 1985 quantized Hall, NP 1987 high-Tc). It also openly reports that Hypothesis 4 only partially supports Kuhn and that the first operationalization of Hypothesis 5 came out backwards before being reframed. That transparency is real credit.

What's genuinely new: nobody has asked whether Nobel practice fits the that-what/what-that distinction. The paper also separates the descriptive claims from the normative credit-attribution argument, which is useful.

The soft spots are concentrated in the classification. The primary coding - which discovery is that-what vs what-that - is done by the author, using categories he introduced, and the reported kappa covers only the descriptor layer, not the type classification. The codebook is not in the manuscript; there's an OSF link. Some decision rules are flexible: quarks and the CMB are classified as that-what because the pre-existing theory 'so happened not to guide the experiments,' which requires a counterfactual community judgment, and NP 1975 is classified as what-that explicitly because the Nobel Committee chose to reward the theory rather than the motivating observations. That last one conflicts with the paper's own claim that award emphasis and discovery facts are orthogonal. The positron discussion concedes type can depend on who published first. So the 19/14 split is less stable than the prose suggests. A re-coding of a handful of borderline cases could shift the surprise percentages, though I wouldn't expect it to flip the general pattern.

Also, Hypothesis 1 is close to trivially true given the corpus: Nobel committees rationally avoid rewarding unresolved identifications. The paper acknowledges this, but it means that the main support for Kuhn's correctness requirement is weaker than 'fully confirmed' implies. The normative conclusion about under-crediting theory is plausible but rests on the same coding.

Who should read this: philosophers of science interested in discovery, and anyone studying Nobel prize patterns. It deserves a serious referee - the empirics are concrete and checkable. But the revision needs to publish the full codebook, report reliability for the primary type coding, and either defend or change the NP 1975 rule. If those are addressed, it's a worthwhile contribution.

Referee Report

1 major / 0 minor

Summary. The paper offers an empirical test of a stripped-down Kuhnian account of natural-kind discovery, using Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1972 to 2024. The author classifies 33 prize motivations as either “that-what” discoveries (observation first, conceptualization later) or “what-that” discoveries (predicted by prior theory), and tests five hypotheses: (H1) discovery requires an at least partially correct conceptualization; (H2) all discoveries fall into the two types; (H3) that-what discoveries are described as surprising and what-that as expected; (H4) that-what discoveries are revolutionary; and (H5) that-what discoveries involve greater epistemic uncertainty. The paper reports that H1 is confirmed except for one case (NP 1987), H2 is fully confirmed with 19 that-what and 14 what-that discoveries, H3 is nearly perfectly confirmed (100% vs. 93%), H4 is ambiguous, and H5 is confirmed via longer Nobel award lags for that-what discoveries. The author draws normative conclusions about the Nobel Committee's under-crediting of theoretical contributions.

Significance. If the empirical claims are sound, the paper would provide the first systematic, large-scale evidence for a Kuhnian distinction between two types of natural-kind discovery, and it would ground a practical normative critique of Nobel Prize credit allocation. The paper has several strengths: it works with a well-defined corpus, it makes its full classification available via OSF, it explicitly acknowledges anomalies (NP 1985 quantized Hall effect; NP 1987 high-temperature superconductors), and it reports intercoder agreement for the descriptor coding. However, the central classification and the test of H1 are vulnerable to coding underdetermination and sample selection; the current evidence is therefore suggestive rather than conclusive. The paper would be a valuable contribution if these concerns are addressed with robustness checks and independent coding of the primary type classification.

major comments (1)

[§3, §4.1 (Hypothesis 2)] The primary classification into that-what vs. what-that discoveries is not independently validated and is governed by flexible rules. The paper reports Cohen's Kappa for the descriptor coding ('surprising'/'expected'/'revolutionary') in §4.2, but not for the type classification itself. In §3, a theory that predates the observation is declared not to make a discovery what-that if it 'so happened not to guide the experiments' (quarks, CMB, 51 Peg), and NP 1975 is classified as what-that explicitly because the Nobel Committee opted not to award the observations that prompted Rainwater's work. These rules make the type assignment depend on counterfactual judgments about guidance and on award emphasis, not on a stable property of the discovery. Since the 19/14 split underlies the '100% vs. 93%' result in Table 2, re-coding even a few borderline cases (CMB, quarks, 51 Peg, NP 1975) could chang

Circularity Check

2 steps flagged · score 6.0 of 10

Central classification is partly circular: H2 is exhaustive by construction, and NP 1975's type is set by the Nobel Committee's award emphasis.

self definitional [§2.2 (Hypothesis 2 definition) and §4.1 (Results for Hypotheses 1 and 2)]
"In either case, a discovery will fall into either of these two classes, unless both kinds of discoveries are published at exactly the same time. I know of no such case. ... Hypothesis 2 was also fully confirmed: all of the natural kind discoveries that I identified fall into the classes of what-that discoveries and that-what discoveries."

The two types are defined by the temporal order of observation ('that') and correct conceptualization ('what'). For any event with both a 'that' date and a 'what' date, one precedes the other, and ties are excluded by fiat. Thus every coded discovery is guaranteed to fall into one of the two classes by the coding scheme itself. The confirmation sentence restates the definitions rather than testing an empirical taxonomy. The only non-tautological residue is that both classes are instantiated, which the paper does not separate from the exhaustive-assignment claim.
other [§3 (complications in method), feeding §4.2 Table 2 and §5 Table 5]
"Because the Nobel Committee opted not to give the award to the observations prompting Rainwater's theoretical work, and because the prize went to Bohr for his theory and Mottelson's confirmation of the theory instead, I decided to categorize the discovery as a what-that discovery."

Rainwater's work was prompted by observed quadrupole deformations, so on the paper's own temporal criterion this looks like 'that' before 'what' (that-what). The paper instead chooses what-that explicitly because the Nobel Committee awarded the theory and its confirmation rather than the prompting observations. The Committee's award emphasis is thus an input to the coding of discovery type. The same type variable is then used to describe the Committee's award emphasis (Table 5), to compute surprise/expected profiles (Table 2), and to measure time-to-prize (Table 4). For this case, the finding about award behavior is forced by the coding rule.

full rationale

The paper does contain independent empirical work: it hand-codes Nobel documents for 'surprising/expected/revolutionary' descriptors, reports intercoder reliability for that descriptor layer, and tests temporal profiles. The self-citation to Schindler (2015) for the names and the correctness requirement is not itself a circularity—the categories are attributed to Kuhn and the coding could in principle be challenged. The circularity is in the classification procedure. H2's 'both types' claim is partly tautological because every dated observation/conceptualization pair is forced into one of two temporal orders and ties are declared nonexistent. More seriously, the NP 1975 rule makes discovery type depend on the very Nobel Committee choices the paper later analyzes. These two coding decisions affect the 19/14 split and hence the surprise and revolutionary percentages and the time-to-prize medians. Because a small number of borderline cases (quarks, CMB, 51 Peg, NP 1975) are resolved by flexible judgments about 'guidance' and Committee emphasis, the headline confirmation is not fully independent of the author's coding. Score 6 reflects partial circularity, not total circularity: most cases have a date-based classification, and the descriptive text analysis is external.

Assumptions & free parameters 4 free parameters · 4 assumptions · 0 invented entities

For a qualitative coding study, the central claim's effective 'free parameters' are the coding decision rules: the correctness criterion, the NP 1975 rule, the date averaging, and the chain decomposition. The axioms are the corpus assumption (Nobel = best science), the absence of relevant systematic biases, the publication-date-fixes-type premise, and the Kappa threshold convention. No new entities are invented; the that-what/what-that labels restate Kuhn's two types.

free parameters (4)

correct-conceptualization criterion (what counts as 'at least partially correct') = essential properties 'that suffice to correctly individuate X at a particular time' (Schindler 2015)
Applied per case by the author; determines Hypothesis 1's outcome (e.g., Lavoisier credited for oxygen despite his caloric belief; the 1987 high-Tc prize counted as the single later-inadequate conception).
NP 1975 classification rule = categorized as what-that
Section 3: the classification follows the Committee's choice of whom to award ('I decided to categorize the discovery as a what-that discovery'), changing the 19/14 tally and the Hypothesis 3 percentages.
date averaging for indeterminate observations/conceptualizations = averages of stated time ranges
Section 4.3: Homestake (1960s-1990s) and the big-bang CMB explanation (developed over decades) are assigned averages; these feed the medians/means in Tables 3-4 that carry Hypothesis 5 (1 vs 38; 20 vs 7 years).
discovery-chain decomposition ('minimal units') = split CP-violation and solar-neutrino chains across multiple prizes; type fixed per prize
Sections 2.2 and 3: the premise that chains decompose into the two minimal types lets each of 33 praise phrases fall into exactly one class; the positron discussion concedes the type depends on publication date.

assumptions (4)

domain assumption Nobel Prizes in Physics highlight 'the best and most important bits of science', making the corpus representative of canonical discoveries.
Section 3; the corpus choice would be invalid for testing a general account of discovery if Nobel selections are atypical; the paper's own first limitation concedes Nobel standards may exceed ordinary science.
domain assumption Apart from the acknowledged gender bias (declared irrelevant), no systematic biases in Nobel Physics awards 1972-2024 affect the discovery-type variables.
Section 3: 'No other systematic biases have been reported after WWI that would be relevant to the current study.' The paper later attributes a systematic experimentalist bias to the Committee, but uses it as a finding rather than a confound.
domain assumption A discovery's type is fixed by the first published observation because 'only published results are available to the scientific community and thus verifiable' (positron case).
Section 2.2; the positron example shows the same underlying event is that-what for Anderson and what-that for Blackett & Occhialini; the taxonomy tracks publication chronology rather than the discovery itself.
domain assumption Cohen's Kappa >= 0.8 counts as excellent intercoder reliability.
Section 4.2, citing O'Connor and Joffe (2020); the reported Kappas cover only the descriptor coding, not the primary type classification on which Hypotheses 1-2 rest.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel Meets Kuhn." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/HVIDFP7C

@misc{pith2026251009069,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel Meets Kuhn},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/HVIDFP7C}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2510.09069}
}

read the original abstract

Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked answer to this question is provided by T.S. Kuhn. In this paper, I show that discoveries awarded with a Nobel Prize in Physics in the past 53 years accord with a basic premise of Kuhn's account and his distinction between two types of natural kind discoveries. I also draw normative conclusions for credit attribution in science.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

37 extracted references · 13 canonical work pages

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1 Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel meets Kuhn Samuel Schindler Centre for Science Studies Aarhus University Abstract Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical “context of discovery”. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of “things in the world”. A much-o...

2022
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Most importantly, perhaps, there were discoveries where a theory was developed before the observations, but where the theory so happened not to guide the experiments. This, for example, was the case for the first compelling evidence for the existence of quarks. James Bjorken predicted the scaling behavior of subatomic (hadronic) particles in 1967, but the...

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[5]

This explanation is supported also by the descriptions that can be found in the documents provided by the Nobel Foundation (NobelPrize.org 2025)

that until prize what until prize that-what 20 (30.7) 15.5 (17.6) what-that 7 (8.2) 52 (47.6) Table 4: The two discoveries and the median (and average) temporal distance from the completion of the discovery to the award of the prize (in years) The reason that suggests itself for this difference is that it takes the community more time to assess whether th...

2025
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Is it a lepton?

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On Serendipity in Science: Discovery at the Intersection of Chance and Wisdom

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The reason for philosophers’ neglect of discovery cannot be due to triviality: historians have long known that discovery is not, as Kuhn put it, like “a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing” (Kuhn 1962/1996, 55). However, histori...

1962
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The episode can again be described as a discovery chain consisting of a that-what discovery and a what-that discovery. 4 Results and Discussion In this section I will report the results I obtained from my analysis of the Nobel Prizes in Physics from 1972 to 2024 with a view of...

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17 I owe this objection to an anonymous reviewer for this journal

and there are four that-what discoveries in which the theorists got the award when the experimenters had already deceased (NP 2005, NP 2003, NP 1982, and NP 1972). 17 I owe this objection to an anonymous reviewer for this journal. 15 emphasis – namely whether the prize should ...

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Again, Mayor and Queloz’s discovery of “51 Peg” is such a case

There were discoveries which proved to be deceptive. Again, Mayor and Queloz’s discovery of “51 Peg” is such a case. Their discovery may at first seem to be a straightforward observation of planetary motion in just another solar systems. So, one may think that this discovery s...

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My findings support both Kuhn’s basic premise and the distinction. Why is Kuhn’s distinction worth pondering for philosophers? Well, first and foremost, the question of “what is a scientific discovery of natural kinds?”, at core, is an question of concept explication on a par ...

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Pith tools

Reviewed August 4, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

[1] [1]

context of discovery

1 Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel meets Kuhn Samuel Schindler Centre for Science Studies Aarhus University Abstract Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical “context of discovery”. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of “things in the world”. A much-o...

2022

[2] [4]

51 Pegasi b

Most importantly, perhaps, there were discoveries where a theory was developed before the observations, but where the theory so happened not to guide the experiments. This, for example, was the case for the first compelling evidence for the existence of quarks. James Bjorken predicted the scaling behavior of subatomic (hadronic) particles in 1967, but the...

1967

[3] [5]

This explanation is supported also by the descriptions that can be found in the documents provided by the Nobel Foundation (NobelPrize.org 2025)

that until prize what until prize that-what 20 (30.7) 15.5 (17.6) what-that 7 (8.2) 52 (47.6) Table 4: The two discoveries and the median (and average) temporal distance from the completion of the discovery to the award of the prize (in years) The reason that suggests itself for this difference is that it takes the community more time to assess whether th...

2025

[4] [13]

Is it a lepton?

In a section entitled “Is it a lepton?”, Perl writes that “our first publication was followed by several years of confusion and uncertainty about the validity of our data and its interpretation”, among other things, because theory did not require a third charged lepton and there were also otherwise no reason to expect a third lepton (Perl 1995, 186-187). ...

1995

[5] [16]

The Age at Which Noble Prize Research Is Conducted

"The Age at Which Noble Prize Research Is Conducted." Scientometrics 119 (2):931-939. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03065-4. Brannigan, Augustine

work page doi:10.1007/s11192-019-03065-4

[6] [17]

Naturalistic and Sociological Models of the Problem of Scientific Discovery

"Naturalistic and Sociological Models of the Problem of Scientific Discovery." The British Journal of Sociology 31 (4):559-573. https://doi.org/10.2307/589790. Carnap, Rudolf

work page doi:10.2307/589790

[7] [18]

On Serendipity in Science: Discovery at the Intersection of Chance and Wisdom

"On Serendipity in Science: Discovery at the Intersection of Chance and Wisdom." Synthese 196 (6):2385-2406. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1544-3. Donovan, Arthur, Larry Laudan, and Rachel Laudan

doi:10.1007/s11229-017-1544-3

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Okasha, Samir

http://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919899220. Okasha, Samir

doi:10.1177/1609406919899220