Scientific Discovery
Теория Открытий

Евгений Е. Витяев и Борис Я. Ковалерчук Evgenii E. Vityaev & Boris Ya. Kovalerchuk

The central problem of Scientific Discovery is to find scientific regularity in experimental observations. In general, any technique may be employed, from wild guesses to careful explorations of mathematical models to discover possible scientific explanations. Historically, inspired guessing has been the predominate technique, but with the massive data sets from genetics and other disciplines now available, more disciplined ways of searching for underlying laws are needed.

It is a classic problem of induction to be given experimental observations and determine the "laws" that explain them and then predict results for similar experiments. The theoretical challenges of scientific discovery must be understood and solved before any structured method to do this with real problems can be successful. In general, an inductive process does not give a unique result. In part this is due to the language(s) used to formulate the problem. In part it is due to the limitations of the data sets that are used.

As a mathematician Vityaev has studied the problems of scientific discovery from several perspectives. His research has shown the important role played by the choice of languages and the type of predictions that can logically follow. He has shown that by extending the notion of language with some properties concerning allowable experimental procedures, the usual paradoxes of induction can be avoided. This makes the problem of induction well founded and gives a solid basis for discovering sets of universal formulas implied by experimental results.

Vityaev's paper proving the theoretical importance of language choice in avoiding the paradoxes of induction is available

Additional information is available on Vityaev and Kovalerchuk's web site