文档介绍：Mario Alai
University of Urbino
mario.******@
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, LOGIC OF
DISCOVERY AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM
Summary: Epistemologists have debated at length whether scientific discovery is a rational
and logical process. If it is, according to the Artificial Intelligence hypothesis, it should be
possible to puter programs able to discover laws or theories; and if such programs
were written, this would definitely prove the existence of a logic of discovery.
Attempts in this direction, however, have been essful: the programs written by
Simon’s group, indeed, infer famous laws of physics and chemistry; but having found no
new law, they cannot properly be considered discovery machines. The programs written in
the «Turing tradition», instead, produced new and useful empirical generalization, but no
theoretical discovery, thus failing to prove the logical character of the most significant kind
of discoveries.
A new cognitivist and connectionist approach by Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard,
looks more promising. Reflection on their proposals helps to understand plex
character of discovery processes, the abandonment of belief in the logic of discovery by
logical positivists, and the necessity of a realist interpretation of scientific research.
1. The epistemological problem of the logic of discovery
Is there a logic of discovery? There has been a long debate on this question among
philosophers of science, with people like Francis Bacon, John Stuart Mill and Hans
Reichenbach answering “yes”, and no less important characters, such as William
Whewell, Albert Einstein, Carl Hempel, and Sir Karl Popper, answering “no”.
No wonder it is so, since the question is torn between the horns of a seemingly
unescapable dilemma: on the one hand, discovery must be rational, for we honour great
discoverers like Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein, etc., as exceptionally rational