Epistemic programming-toward a new programming paradigm for scientific discovery

Abstract

Any scientific discovery must include an epistemic process to gain knowledge of or to ascertain the existence of some empirical and/or logical entailments previously unknown or unrecognized. This paper proposes a new programming paradigm, named epistemic programming, which regards entailments as the subject of computing, takes three primary epistemic operations, i.e., epistemic deduction of knowledge, epistemic expansion of knowledge, and epistemic contraction of knowledge, as basic operations of computing, and regards epistemic processes as the subject of programming. The paper presents a relevant logic model of epistemic processes in scientific discovery. Based on the model, the paper defines what is an epistemic program and shows some important issues to implement an epistemic programming system for scientists to program their epistemic processes in scientific discovery.