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Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy of Science Reasoning by Analogy in Theory Construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Lindley Darden
Lindley Darden*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Extract

As a historian and philosopher of science, I am interested in the process of the construction of new scientific theories. The hypothesis to be explored in this paper is that analogies may play an important role in the generation of new ideas that are built into new theories.

In order to make clear the locus of my discussion, I would like to present an over-simplified view of the levels of organization of scientific knowledge. The three levels are the following: data, empirical generalizations, and explanatory theories. At the lowest level of generality are the data, particular statements about, particular facts. For example, if we consider data from genetics, in a cross between a yellow pea plant and a green pea plant, all the peas of the first generation of hybrids are yellow; if the hybrids are self-fertilized, the second hybrid generation has a ratio of three yellow peas to one green pea.

Type
Part III. Discovery, Heuristics, and Artificial Intelligence
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 147 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank students in my seminars on analogical reasoning at the Computer Science Department at Stanford and the Philosophy Department at Maryland for their many helpful comments on the ideas in this paper. Also helpful were comments I received at the Philosophy Departments of Vassar and American University and the Computer Science Department at Rutgers, where I presented earlier drafts. I especially thank Bruce Buchanan, Russell Greiner, Lars Rodseth, Richard Kellar, David Kohn, Louis Steinberg, and Marcia Kraft for specific comments and suggestions. I appreciate the time and space provided for research and writing over the last two years by sabbatical leave and a General Research Board Grant from University of Maryland, a visiting scholar position with the Heuristic Programming Project at Stanford, a guest account on the SUHEX-AIM computing facility, a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a visiting scholar position at the Department of History of Science at Harvard.

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