Discovering Mechanisms: A Computational Philosophy of Science Perspective

摘要

A task in the philosophy of discovery is to find reasoning strategies for discovery, which fall into three categories: strategies for generation, evaluation and revision. Because mechanisms are often what is discovered in biology, a new characterization of mechanism aids in their discovery. A computational system for discovering mechanisms is sketched, consisting of a simulator, a library of mechanism schemas and components, and a discoverer for generating, evaluating and revising proposed mechanism schemas. Revisions go through stages from how possibly to how plausibly to how actually.