Dynamic Agencies and Creative Scientific Discovery

Among the traditional two approaches to scientific discovery, which assume that scientific discovery is a totally rational or a totally irrational activity, we adopt a third intermediate approach that envisages a bipolar scientific discovery in which man and machine are synergically involved. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the mutual interaction between two interesting roles that machine plays in bipolar scientific discovery. In particular, we propose a novel machine of distributed artificial intelligence, called dynamic agency, as suitable to address the double role of supporting man and of describing the results of scientific discovery.