Programming with Conditionals: Epistemic Programming for Scientific Discovery

In order to provide scientists with a computational methodology and some computational tools to program their epistemic processes in scientific discovery, we are establishing a novel programming paradigm, named ‘Epistemic Programming’, which regards conditionals as the subject of computing, takes primary epistemic operations as basic operations of computing, and regards epistemic processes as the subject of programming. This paper seminally presents our fundamental observations and assumptions on scientific discovery processes and their automation, research problems on modeling, automating, and programming epistemic processes, and an outline of our research project of Epistemic Programming.