In December 2019, Oxford University Press published the scientific imagination: philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (translated as "scientific imagination: philosophical and psychological perspectives") by Arnon levy, a philosopher of science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Peter Godfrey Smith, a philosopher at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Imagination is not a random generator of creativity, nor is it limited to the association of ideas. Imagination is often intelligent, informative and highly focused. There are 13 articles in this book, which reflects a growing consensus in academic circles that imagination plays a key role in science. Imagination is needed not only to put forward hypotheses, but also to test hypotheses. Thought experiments and idealized models are outstanding examples reflecting the importance of imagination.

However, it is still a serious challenge to accurately describe the nature of scientific imagination and its products. There are 16 authors in these 13 articles. They are mainly philosophers and historians of science. Some of them have studied and thought about scientific imagination for many years.

The most important information provided by this book is to make people realize that imagination really plays the role of epistemology and ontology in scientific inquiry. No matter how we evaluate this role, the function of this role is extensive and complex, which has not been studied in depth so far.

The two chief editors wrote at the beginning that "although imagination is so important, it seldom gets systematic attention in the philosophy of science.". This book resists the common view that the humanities, especially fiction, emphasize imagination. The 16 authors agree that imagination is an important tool of scientific thinking.

Deena skolnick Weisberg wrote at the beginning of her article, "science is essentially about imagination. This statement may surprise most people, who are used to thinking that science and imagination are opposite. Later, she analyzed the reason for "opposition": "science is to discover the operating mechanism of the real world, and imagination, by definition, cares about things outside the real world."

The first chapter of this book is an article by fiora Salis and Roman Frigg. They draw readers' attention to two processes: scientific model and thought experiment. They discuss the two together, because both can "make a natural explanation through imagination or pretence".

Three articles were written by cognitive psychologists. Tania lombrozo discusses "learning through imagination" in science and everyday life; Deena skolnick Weisberg's question is "is imagination too limited for science"; Igor bascandziev and Paul L. Harris asked, "can children benefit from thought experiments?"? These articles provide evidence that imagination plays a cognitive role in making correct predictions of simple causality.

The question raised by Amie L. Thompson is "if the model is a novel, what would it look like?". Martin Thomson Jones discusses the "realistic view of the missing system". Martin Thomson Jones said that if two people were discussing Flaubert's Madame Bovary, they would say "Emma is not happy.". They don't think Emma is real, but the statement "Emma is not happy" makes sense. This phenomenon is in fact interlinked with the semantic problem of missing system modeling. Both of them focus on the ontology of models.

Arnon levy discusses "metaphor and scientific explanation". It is true that various comparisons and analogies are constantly used in scientific interpretation, but they are different from metaphor in psychology, cognition and semantics. What distinguishes the two sides is Elisabeth camp's article, "imaginative framework of scientific inquiry: metaphor, vivid facts and imaginary stories".

In the article "Imagine mechanism through graph", two authors, Benjamin sheredos and William Bechtel, illustrate through a detailed case that graph plays a key role in inferring the explanation mechanism of the biological cycle of cyanobacteria.

Michael Weisberg's "abstraction and expressiveness of computational structure" is to respond to the view that in order to fully express causal structure, models need to become counterfactual fictions, rather than purely mathematical structures.

He explained that the causal structure of the target system can be expressed through the computational structure of the computer program, and the interpretation of the computational structure can be adjusted to obtain the required generality, which is not possible in fictional works.

Stephen yablos's article is about "model and reality". This article has the flavor of "modeling of modeling". This kind of meta problems, such as "the science of science", "the meaning of meaning", "the data of data" (i.e. metadata), are extremely important.

Elisabeth camp is the last article in the book. She distinguished a series of related concepts: metaphor, analogy, frame, abstraction, conceptualization and so on. There are also some other important concepts throughout the book, such as fiction, "counterfactual theory", the real world, pretending and so on.

Although there are so many views, the most investigated in this book are scientific models and thought experiments.