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Scientific Discovery from the Perspective of Hypothesis Acceptance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Eric Martin  and
Daniel Osherson
Eric Martin*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
Daniel Osherson*
Affiliation:
Rice University
*
Martin: School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, emartin@cse.unsw.edu.au; Osherson: Psychology Dept., MS-25, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston TX 77005–1892, osherson@rice.edu
Martin: School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, emartin@cse.unsw.edu.au; Osherson: Psychology Dept., MS-25, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston TX 77005–1892, osherson@rice.edu
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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 (“the real world”) 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue S3 , September 2002 , pp. S331 - S341
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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