On Giraffes and Bank Accounts: Rethinking Discovery, Creation, and Literary Imagination

Abstract

What exactly do we mean by “discovery?” How does discovery relate to the question of whether there are “things out there” just waiting for us to discover them? And who is the “we” of the previous two questions? Does discovery simply indicate that “we” (my group however defined) have found something “we” previously had not known? What if others, unknown to my group, had already found what we have now “discovered?” Does that discount our finding as a true discovery? Whose perspective counts in such a case?

We normally say that a bank account is a social construction rather than an object in the natural world, whereas a giraffe is an object in the natural world rather than a social construction. Bank accounts are made, giraffes are found. Now the truth in this view is simply that if there had been no human beings there would still have been giraffes, whereas there would have been no bank accounts. But this causal independence of giraffes from humans does not mean that giraffes are what they are apart from human needs and interests.

Richard Rorty¹