Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Why did the oxygen theory of combustion supersede the phlogiston theory? Why is Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection superior to creationism? How can a jury in a murder trial decide between conflicting views of what happened? This target article develops a theory of explanatory coherence that applies to the evaluation of competing hypotheses in cases such as these. The theory is implemented in a connectionist computer program with many interesting properties. The problem of inference to explanatory hypotheses has a long history in philosophy and a much shorter one in psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists and philosophers have long considered the evaluation of theories on the basis of their explanatory power. In the late nineteenth century, Peirce discussed two forms of inference to explanatory hypotheses: hypothesis , which involved the acceptance of hypotheses, and abduction , which involved merely the initial formation of hypotheses (Peirce 1931–1958; Thagard 1988a). Researchers in artificial intelligence and some philosophers have used the term “abduction” to refer to both the formation and the evaluation of hypotheses. AI work on this kind of inference has concerned such diverse topics as medical diagnosis (Josephson et al. 1987; Pople 1977; Reggia et al. 1983) and natural language interpretation (Charniak and McDermott 1985; Hobbs et al. 1988). In philosophy, the acceptance of explanatory hypotheses is usually called inference to the best explanation (Harman 1973, 1986). In social psychology, attribution theory considers how people in everyday life form hypotheses to explain events (Fiske and Taylor 1984).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".