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Abductive reasoning

About: Abductive reasoning is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1917 publications have been published within this topic receiving 44645 citations. The topic is also known as: abduction & abductive inference.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that reasoning is not always a matter of belief revision, and that logic is, in fact, of the utmost relevance to both reasoning and belief revision; they argue that Harman fails to establish the need for such a theory.
Abstract: In Change of View: Principles of Reasoning, Gilbert Harman argues that (i) all genuine reasoning is a matter of belief revision, and that, since (ii) logic is not “specially relevant” to belief revision, (iii) logic is not specially relevant to reasoning, either. Thus, Harman suggests, what is needed is a “theory of reasoning”–which, incidentally, will be psychologistic, telling us both how we do and how we should reason. I argue that Harman fails to establish the need for such a theory, because (a) reasoning is not always a matter of belief revision, and (b) logic is, in fact, of the utmost relevance to both reasoning and belief revision.

7 citations

01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: By presenting a particular case in neurology, this analysis supports the idea that clinical judgment, which goes back to the XIXth century and rests upon a rational medicine based on diagnostics, is very much in use.
Abstract: Medicine and logic: the diagnosis process in neurology How do doctors think when they ought to solve the enigma: what is my patient suffering from? Such is the question behind this article. Our analysis rests on real life situations, where medical residents discuss specific cases in neurology, aiming at a joint diagnosis. Our theoretical thesis claims that the diagnostic process has a rational component that lends itself to logical reconstruction, though it still requires the personal presence of a medical doctor. By presenting a particular case in neurology we show how the cognitive process, which strive at the several diagnoses of this specialty, namely the syndromatic, topographic and etiologic, is reconstructed via abductive reasoning, in combination with deductive reasoning when discarding diagnostic hypotheses is in order. This analysis supports the idea that clinical judgment, which goes back to the XIXth century and rests upon a rational medicine based on diagnostics, is very much in use. Key words: Medical logic, medical knowledge, diagnosis, neurology, cognitive process, abduction, deduction, induction, inference to the best explanation.

7 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Nov 2000
TL;DR: The task of learning the graphical structure can be considered as a kind of abductive reasoning, because the authors are trying to find the most adequate structure given the data, i.e., the structure that best explains the observations.
Abstract: The concept of independence is essential to perform efficiently reasoning tasks, because of its capacity to modularise the available knowledge. Using independence relationships for the variables in a given domain of knowledge, we can construct graphical representations for this domain, called belief networks, where inference can be done by means of local computations. When the independence relationships between the variables are not given directly but we are using a data set, containing instances of the variables in the domain, to estimate them, the task of learning the graphical structure can be considered as a kind of abductive reasoning, because we are trying to find the most adequate structure given the data, i.e., the structure that best explains the observations.

7 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Nov 2000
TL;DR: The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a major case study: abduction in implicational labelled deductive systems, and demonstrate a general methodology of abduction in logical systems.
Abstract: The chapter by G Paul in this Volume gives an overview of major existing abductive reasoning methods in Artificial Intelligence The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a major case study: abduction in implicational labelled deductive systems, and demonstrate a general methodology of abduction in logical systems

7 citations

Book ChapterDOI
24 Jul 2009
TL;DR: It is shown how optimisation meta-predicates can be included in abductive proof-procedures, achieving in this way a significant improvement to research and practical applications of abductive reasoning.
Abstract: Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) and Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) share the feature to constrain the set of possible solutions to a program via integrity or CLP constraints. These two frameworks have been merged in works by various authors, who developed efficient abductive proof-procedures empowered with constraint satisfaction techniques. However, while almost all CLP languages provide algorithms for finding an optimal solution with respect to some objective function (and not just any solution), the issue has received little attention in ALP. In this paper we show how optimisation meta-predicates can be included in abductive proof-procedures, achieving in this way a significant improvement to research and practical applications of abductive reasoning. In the paper, we give the declarative and operational semantics of an abductive proof-procedure that encloses constraint optimization meta-predicates, and we prove soundness in the three-valued completion semantics. In the proof-procedure, the abductive logic program can invoke optimisation meta-predicates, which can invoke abductive predicates, in a recursive way.

7 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202356
2022103
202156
202059
201956
201867