OBJECTIVES The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (JRCD) has published important contributions to both criminological theory and associated empirical tests. In this article, we consider some of the challenges associated with traditional approaches to social science research, and discuss a complementary approach that is gaining popularity-agent-based computational modeling-that may off...

In order to develop an account of scientific rationality, two problems need to be addressed: (i) how to make sense of episodes of theory change in science where the lack of a cumulative development is found, and (ii) how to accommodate cases of scientific change where lack of consistency is involved. In this paper, we sketch a model of scientific rationality that accommodates both problems. We ...

The article presents the theses of descriptive theory metaphor by A.N. Baranov, which is based on provisions cognitive metaphorization processes. analyzes theories metaphor, characterizing role in language and processes thinking themselves. Particular attention paid to modern conceptual its difference from traditional theories.

One of the main shortcomings of traditional methods for combining theories is the complexity of guessing the arrangement of variables shared by the individual theories. This paper presents a reformulation of the Nelson-Oppen method that takes into account explicit equality propagation and can ignore pairs of shared variables that the theories do not care about. We show the correctness of the ne...

In inductive learning of a broad concept, an algorithm should be able to distinguish concept examples from exceptions and noisy data. An approach through recursively finding patterns in exceptions turns out to correspond to the problem of learning default theories. Default logic is what humans employ in commonsense reasoning. Therefore, learned default theories are better understood by humans. ...