A Truth Maintenance System for Epistemic Programming Environment

Epistemic Programming was proposed as a novel program paradigm to program epistemic processes in scientific discovery, and an epistemic programming language and its implementation were also proposed and developed. The paradigm of Epistemic Programming 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. In order to provide scientists with a high-level and general-purpose mechanism to deal with belief revision more easily in Epistemic Programming, this paper proposes a truth maintenance system for epistemic programming environments. At first, the paper analyzes features of a truth maintenance system for epistemic programming environment. Then, the paper gives a requirement analysis of the truth maintenance system, and shows a design of the truth maintenance system. The proposed truth maintenance system is suitable for epistemic programming environment, and can deal with replacement of logic systems underlying reasoning in epistemic processes.