Towards a Normative Theory of Scientific Evidence

A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a system that derives probability intervals from objective evidence in those forms. Our reasoning system can manage uncertainty about data and rules in a rule based expert system. We expect that our system will be particularly applicable to diagnosis and analysis in domains with a wealth of experimental evidence such as medicine. We discuss limitations of this solution and propose future directions for this research. This work can be considered a generalization of Nilsson's "probabilistic logic" [Nil86] to intervals and experimental observations.