Report 79-28 Stanford -- KSL

Because this paper is about computer programs thal generate explanations, my debt to Prof. Hempel will be obvious. However, insofar as I wish to use the term'discovery' to cover the activity of finding explanations, I know that Prof. Hempel will not entirely agree with these ideas about mechanizing the activity. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate a very simple idea: that discovery in science and medicine can be profitably viewed as systematic exclusion of hypotheses. That is, hypotheses that explain empirical data can be found systematically by methods that can be implemented in computer programs. The conditions under which this view makes sense are an important part of the elaboration. Two necessary conditions are that the space of relevant hypotheses is definable and that there exist criteria of rejection and acceptability. Because the space of hypotheses is immense for most interesting problems, it is also desirable that there exist criteria for guiding a systematic search.