From Becquerel's uranium rock to Newton's proverbial rock and Fleming's serendipitous observation of penicillin, the way science is done has come to be associated often with a romanticized but highly suspect notion of objectivity. This may very well be the effect on science of inductivism and the bold claim of the proponents of inductivism that science could not possibly lead to any kind of tru...

John Norton has proposed a position of “material induction” that denies the existence of a universal inductive inference schema behind scientific reasoning. In this vein, Norton has recently presented a “dome scenario” based on Newtonian physics that, in his understanding, is at variance with Bayesianism. The present note points out that a closer analysis of the dome scenario reveals incompatib...

If we regard science as the human enterprise of understanding the natural world, we might regard computer science as the computer’s enterprise of understanding the artificial world. We have language, memory and structure for our knowledge representation. Computers have their own language, memory, and structure, which comprise their “understanding”. Careful investigation into epistemology and me...

In this chapter I discuss connections between machine learning and the philosophy of science. First I consider the relationship between the two disciplines. There is a clear analogy between hypothesis choice in science and model selection in machine learning. While this analogy has been invoked to argue that the two disciplines are essentially doing the same thing and should merge, I maintain t...

A discovery system for detecting correspondences in data is described, based on the familiar induction methods of J. S. Mill. Given a set of observations, the system induces the “causally” related facts in these observations. Its application to empirical linguistic discovery is described. The paper is organized as follows. I begin the discussion by revealing two developments, the transformation...

Many scientists believe that there is a uniform, interdisciplinary method for the practice of good science. The paradigmatic examples, however, are drawn from classical experimental science. Insofar as historical hypotheses cannot be tested in controlled laboratory settings, historical research is sometimes said to be inferior to experimental research. Using examples from diverse historical dis...