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.

Answer set programs with optional rules: a possibilistic approach

Abstract: Many problems in artificial intelligence can be encoded as answer set programs (ASP) in which some rules are uncertain. ASP programs with incorrect rules may have erroneous conclusions, but due to the non-monotonic nature of ASP, omitting a correct rule may also lead to errors. To derive the most certain conclusions from an uncertain ASP program, we thus need to consider all situations in which some, none, or all of the least certain rules are omitted. This corresponds to treating some rules as optional and reasoning about which conclusions remain valid regardless of the inclusion of these optional rules. While a version of possibilistic ASP (PASP) based on this view has recently been introduced, no implementation is currently available. In this paper we propose a simulation of the main reasoning tasks in PASP using (disjunctive) ASP programs, allowing us to take advantage of state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Furthermore, we identify how several interesting AI problems can be naturally seen as special cases of the considered reasoning tasks, including cautious abductive reasoning and conformant planning. As such, the proposed simulation enables us to solve instances of the latter problem types that are more general than what current solvers can handle.

Idealization, abduction, and progressive scientific change

Abstract: After a brief comparison of Aliseda's account with different approaches to abductive reasoning, I relate abduction, as studied by Aliseda, to idealization, a notion which also occupies a very important role in sci- entific change, as well as to different ways of dealing with the growth of scientific knowledge understood as a particular kind of non-monotonic process. A particularly interesting kind of abductive reasoning could be that of finding an appropriate concretization case for a theory, originally revealed as extraordinarily success- ful but later discovered to be strictly false or only approximately or ideally true. I try to show this with the example of the Kepler-Newton relation. At the end of the paper, I give criteria in order to construe abduc- tive explanations in correspondence with a reasonable account of empirical progress.

Uma Perspectiva Pragmática da Lógica da Descoberta e da Criatividade

Abstract: In this paper we intend to articulate the Peircean concept of abductive reasoning to the dynamics of the Logic of Discovery and creativity. For that, we firstly aim at reconstructing the concept of abduction. In accordance with Peirce (CP 2.96), abductive reasoning is one sort of inference that brings new elements to argumentation, which can be potentially taken as reasonable or a provisory valid conclusion, as those adopted in the Logic of Discovery. In this sense, the mental creative action in principle develops in the connections of judgments conducted by means of the insertion of new ideas that was not related within the cognitive agent’s conceptual net. This kind of mental action, when organized in accordance with abduction, pushes the developments of processes which involve the logic of discovery and creation. In accordance with Peirce (CP 1.383), there is an interior compulsion that leads us to gather ideas from our perspectives of time and space, regarding the interest of gaining intelligibility by means of meaning constructions formed in the ideas connections we established in our mind. In this context, the works of the artist or the scientist are not very different. “The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man” (CP 1.383). To elucidate such utterance we show some examples in science and art, on which abductive reasoning is manifest.