Abstract
The work presented here tackles the problem of inductive reasoning in
medical discoveries. The discovery of the causes of scurvy is studied
and simulated using computational means. An inductive algorithm is
successful in simulating some essential steps in the progress of the
understanding of the disease and also allows us to simulate the false
reasoning of previous centuries through the introduction of some a
priori knowledge inherited from pre-clinical medicine. These results
confirm the good results obtained by other AI researchers with an
inductive approach of discovery, and illustrate the importance of the
social and cultural environment on the way the inductive inference is
performed and on its outcome.
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