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.

Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning

Abstract: This volume explores abductive cognition, an important but, at least until the third quarter of the last century, neglected topic in cognition. The book aims at increasing knowledge about creative and expert inferences. The study of these high-levelmethods of abductive reasoning is situated at the crossroads of philosophy, logic, epistemology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, animal cognition and evolutionary theories; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. Philosophers of science in the twentieth century have traditionally distinguished between the inferential processes active in the logic of discovery and the ones active in the logic of justification. Most have concluded that no logic of creative processes exists and, moreover, that a rational model of discovery is impossible. In short, scientific creative inferences are irrational and there is no reasoning to hypotheses. On the other hand, some research in the area of artificial intelligence has shown that methods for discovery could be found that are computationally adequate for rediscovering or discovering for the first time empirical or theoretical laws and theorems.

The role of logic in knowledge representation and commonsense reasoning

Abstract: This paper examines the role that formal logic ought to play in representing and reasoning with commonsense knowledge. We take issue with the commonly held view (as expressed by Newell [1980]) that the use of representations based on formal logic is inappropriate in most applications of artificial intelligence. We argue to the contrary that there is an important set of issues, involving incomplete knowledge of a problem situation, that so far have been addressed only by systems based on formal logic and deductive inference, and that, in some sense, probably can be dealt with only by systems based on logic and deduction. We further argue that the experiments of the late 1960s on problem-solving by theorem-proving did not show that the use of logic and deduction in AI systems was necessarily inefficient, but rather that what was needed was better control of the deduction process, combined with more attention to the computational properties of axioms.

On the Relationship Between Abduction and Deduction

Abstract: n a The aim of this paper is at analyzing from various points of view the relationships betwee bduction and deduction. In particular, we consider a meta-level definition of abduction in l d terms of deduction, similar to various definitions proposed in the literature, and an object-leve efinition in which abductive conclusions are expressed as a logical consequence of the obser. T vations and of a simple transformation of the domain theory based on predicate completion he equivalence between the two definitions is proved for domain theories of considerable s expressive power. The object-level characterization we propose uses very simple forms of rea oning and the equivalence result allows us to make explicit some of the assumptions underly-