There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term model comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book s contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

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Einstein often expressed the sentiment that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," and that science is the means through which we comprehend it. However, nearly every one - including scientists - agrees that the concepts of modem physics are quite incomprehensible: They are both unintelligible to the educated lay-person and to the scientific community itself, where there is much dispute over the interpretation of even (and especially) the most basic concepts. There is, of course, almost universal agreement that modem science quite adequately accounts for and predicts...

Einstein often expressed the sentiment that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," and that science is the means through which we comprehend it. However, nearly every one - including scientists - agrees that the concepts of modem physics are quite incomprehensible: They are both unintelligible to the educated lay-person and to the scientific community itself, where there is much dispute over the interpretation of even (and especially) the most basic concepts. There is, of course, almost universal agreement that modem science quite adequately accounts for and predicts...

For some time now the philosophy of science has been undergoing a major transfor- mation. It began when the 'received view' of scientific knowledge -that developed by logical positivists and their intellectual descendants - was challenged as bearing little resemblance to and having little relevance for the understanding of real science. Subsequently, an overwhelming amount of criticism has been added. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would support the 'received view' today. Yet, in the search for a new analysis of scientific knowledge, this view continues to exert influence over...

Information technology has been, in recent years, under increasing commercial pressure to provide devices and systems which help/ replace the human in his daily activity. This pressure requires the use of logic as the underlying foundational workhorse of the area. New logics were developed as the need arose and new foci and balance has evolved within logic itself. One aspect of these new trends in logic is the rising impor- tance of model based reasoning. Logics have become more and more tailored to applications and their reasoning has become more and more application dependent. In fact, some...

There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term model comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book s contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

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The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the Interna- tional Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (MBR'98), held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 1998. The papers explore how scientific thinking uses models and explanatory reasoning to produce creative changes in theories and concepts. The study of diagnostic, visual, spatial, analogical, and temporal rea- soning has demonstrated that there are many ways of performing intelligent and creative reasoning that cannot be described with the help only of tradi- tional...