Related papers: The Social Abduction of Science
Open logic programs and open entailment have been recently proposed as an abstract framework for the verification of incomplete specifications based upon normal logic programs and the stable model semantics. There are obvious analogies…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…
From pathogens and computer viruses to genes and memes, contagion models have found widespread utility across the natural and social sciences. Despite their success and breadth of adoption, the approach and structure of these models remain…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
The problem of induction has persisted since Hume exposed the logical gap between repeated observation and universal inference. Traditional attempts to resolve it have oscillated between two extremes: the probabilistic optimism of Laplace…
Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known…
An inductive logic can be formulated in which the elements are not propositions or probability distributions, but information systems. The logic is complete for information systems with binary hypotheses, i.e., it applies to all such…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
Artificial intelligence has demonstrated remarkable capability in predicting scientific properties, yet scientific discovery remains an inherently physical, long-horizon pursuit governed by experimental cycles. Most current computational…
The problem of Information Retrieval is, given a set of documents D and a query q, providing an algorithm for retrieving all documents in D relevant to q. However, retrieval should depend and be updated whenever the user is able to provide…
Causality has become a fundamental approach for explaining the relationships between events, phenomena, and outcomes in various fields of study. It has invaded various fields and applications, such as medicine, healthcare, economics,…
Abduction, first proposed in the setting of classical logics, has been studied with growing interest in the logic programming area during the last years. In this paper we study {\em abduction with penalization} in logic programming. This…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Deductive and abductive reasoning are two critical paradigms for analyzing knowledge graphs, enabling applications from financial query answering to scientific discovery. Deductive reasoning on knowledge graphs usually involves retrieving…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
This paper avers that science is not demarcated from other disciplines by a specific unique methodology, but by its specific scientific rationality and rational grounds. In this context, the notion and structure of scientific reason are…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication. Due to the importance of explanations in…
In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to underlying processes of the information exchange. Meaning processing incurs on information processing with hindsight, while information processing recursively follows the time…
Argumentation is the process of constructing arguments about propositions, and the assignment of statements of confidence to those propositions based on the nature and relative strength of their supporting arguments. The process is modelled…