Scientific discovery from the perspective of hypothesis acceptance

Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S331-S341 (2002)
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Abstract

A model of inductive inquiry is defined within the context of first‐order logic. The model conceives of inquiry as a game between Nature and a scientist. To begin the game, a nonlogical vocabulary is agreed upon by the two players, along with a partition of a class of countable structures for that vocabulary. Next, Nature secretly chooses one structure from some cell of the partition. She then presents the scientist with a sequence of facts about the chosen structure. With each new datum the scientist announces a guess about the cell to which the chosen structure belongs. To succeed in his or her inquiry, the scientist’s successive conjectures must be correct all but finitely often, that is, the conjectures must converge in the limit to the correct cell. Different kinds of scientists can be investigated within this framework. At opposite ends of the spectrum are dumb scientists that rely on the strategy of “induction by enumeration,” and smart scientists that rely on an operator of belief revision. We report some results about the scope and limits of these two inductive strategies

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Citations of this work

Formal models of coherence and legal epistemology.Amalia Amaya - 2007 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 15 (4):429-447.

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References found in this work

The logic of scientific discovery.Karl Raimund Popper - 1934 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Hutchinson Publishing Group.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.Karl Popper - 1959 - Studia Logica 9:262-265.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.K. Popper - 1959 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (37):55-57.
The Logic of Reliable Inquiry.Kevin T. Kelly - 1996 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press USA. Edited by Kevin Kelly.

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