The Interdependencies of Theory Formation, Revision, and Experimentation

Abstract

This paper depicts theory development as a synergistic cooperation of scientific methodologies, each focusing on different aspects of the problem. It discusses how they may be integrated to provide a more unified and comprehensive treatment of scientific theory discovery. We describe a general protocol for interaction between theory formation, theory revision, and experimentation. This protocol enables theory formation to make specific queries about the state of the world to fulfill its hypothesis generation goals. It also enables experimentation-based revision to post tasks for theory formation to supply relevant hypotheses. The utility and generality of this protocol is demonstrated by an implementation of our unified framework, which consists of the integration of two, previously autonomous systems. Its performance is described for discovering and revising models of evaporation and osmosis.

Cite

Text

Falkenhainer and Rajamoney. "The Interdependencies of Theory Formation, Revision, and Experimentation." International Conference on Machine Learning, 1988. doi:10.1016/B978-0-934613-64-4.50041-4

Markdown

[Falkenhainer and Rajamoney. "The Interdependencies of Theory Formation, Revision, and Experimentation." International Conference on Machine Learning, 1988.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/1988/falkenhainer1988icml-interdependencies/) doi:10.1016/B978-0-934613-64-4.50041-4

BibTeX

@inproceedings{falkenhainer1988icml-interdependencies,
  title     = {{The Interdependencies of Theory Formation, Revision, and Experimentation}},
  author    = {Falkenhainer, Brian and Rajamoney, Shankar A.},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {1988},
  pages     = {353-366},
  doi       = {10.1016/B978-0-934613-64-4.50041-4},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/1988/falkenhainer1988icml-interdependencies/}
}