The aim of this paper is to elucidate some aspects of Karl Popper’s logic of research and place it in the philosophical discussion of scientific discovery. A closer look into his proposal reveals that his work, in the light of recent literature, does point into the direction of some fundamental m..

Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation is a much awaited original contribution to the study of abductive reasoning, providing logical foundations and a rich sample of pertinent applications. Divided into three parts on the conceptual framework, the logical foundations, and the applications, this monograph takes the reader for a comprehensive and erudite tour through the taxonomy of abductive reasoning, via the logical workings of abductive inference ending with applications pertinent to scientific explanation, empirical progress, pragmatism and belief revision.

We propose a logic of abduction that (i) provides an appropriate formalization of the explanatory conditional, and that (ii) captures the defeasible nature of abductive inference. For (i), we argue that explanatory conditionals are non-classical, and rely on Brian Chellas’s work on conditional logics for providing an alternative formalization of the explanatory conditional. For (ii), we make use of the adaptive logics framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. We show how our proposal allows for a more natural reading of explanatory relations, (...) and how it overcomes problems faced by other systems in the literature. (shrink)

The purpose of this piece is to provide a critical analysis on some key aspects of abduction, as conceived by several researchers through my book Abductive Reasoning. These contributions raise fundamental questions concerning the conjectural character of abduction, its psychological status, its logical and computational structure as well as its role as inference to the best explanation and as a process of epistemic change.

In this paper I address the question of the dynamics of empirical progress, both in theory evaluation and in theory improvement. I meet the challenge laid down by Theo Kuipers in Kuipers (1999), namely to operationalize the task of "instrumentalist abduction," that is, theory revision aiming at empirical progress. I offer a reformulation of Kuipers' account of empirical progress in the framework of (extended) semantic tableaux and show that this is indeed an appealing method by which to account for some (...) specific kind of empirical progress, that of lacunae. (shrink)

The purpose of this piece is to provide a critical analysis on some key aspects of abduction, as conceived by several researchers through my book Abductive Reasoning. These contributions raise fundamental questions concerning the conjectural character of abduction, its psychological status, its logical and computational structure as well as its role as inference to the best explanation and as a process of epistemic change.

In this paper I argue for a place for logic inscientific methodology, at the same level asthat of computational and historicalapproaches. While it is well known that a awhole generation of philosophers dismissedLogical Positivism (not just for the logicthough), there are at least two reasons toreconsider logical approaches in the philosophyof science. On the one hand, the presentsituation in logical research has gone farbeyond the formal developments that deductivelogic reached last century, and new researchincludes the formalization of several othertypes of (...) reasoning, like induction andabduction. On the other hand, we call for abalanced Philosophy of Science, one inwhich both methods, the formal and thehistorical may be complementary, togetherproviding a pluralistic view of science, inwhich no method is the predominant one. (shrink)

In Philosophy, it is well known that of the total faculty population, the proportion of women is significantly lower than men. This disproportion is odd for a discipline within the humanities; these numbers seem more compatible with what is found in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) careers. These proportions are in turn a product of the low female presence that exists from the previous levels of academic training in philosophy. What happens in the case of the philosophy student body? For (...) example, the report presented by BeeBee and Saul (2011), on women in philosophy in the United Kingdom, in the period 2008 and 2009, points out that in the first degrees of academic training, in the bachelor's degree, women occupy 45% of the student population, in the master's degree 38% and in the doctorate 35%. Thus, "it is notable that there is a reduction in the proportion of women from the bachelor's degree to the doctorate [...]. This has as a consequence that at the professional level women holding positions as professors represent only 19%" (BeeBee & Saul, 2011, p. 11). Recently, Torres González (2018), based on European Union studies, points out that in Spain, with respect to gender disparity in students, "the data yield as a result masculinized studies, where, contrary to what happens in the branch of the humanities to which it [philosophy] belongs, males outnumber females by 28 percentage points" (2018, p. 328). This disparity is reflected in philosophy at the professional level, "the indicators of vertical segregation show a reinforced glass ceiling, which presents one of the worst data of hierarchical discrimination in the university: the percentage of female professors in philosophy is 12% compared to 21% of female professors in higher education" (Idem). Although it is a fact that there are fewer women than men studying philosophy and, therefore, fewer women than men working professionally in this discipline, we do not yet have possible explanations for this phenomenon of gender disparity in the student body in philosophy. In some cases, even if the number of women entering the philosophy degree program is already low, the number of women graduating is even lower, which indicates that there is attrition along the way; the initial numbers of women entering the program tend to decrease by the time they graduate. Thus we come to the question that is the subject of this paper: What causes female students to drop out of the philosophy program? In this article we answer this question from the philosophy of science and supported by local empirical data, so we do not give a complete or even less exhaustive answer. We review two explanatory models that purport to answer the question of why there are fewer women in philosophy, both formatively and professionally. These are the Different Voices Model (DVM) and the Perfect Storm Model (PSM); we opt for the latter and give reasons for it. Regarding the empirical aspect of our research, our source of statistical data belongs to the undergraduate program in philosophy at the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán-UNAM, Mexico (FES Acatlán), obtained in the framework of the SWIP-Analytic Mexico workshops. Our analysis of these data shows that even when female students have better GPAs than male students and take fewer subjects while enrolled, female students graduate less than male students in the FES Acatlan degree program. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the logical approach to philosophy of science could be further improved with tools like the ones put forward by Schurz in his proposal to model scientific theory development. Section 2 is a presentation of the basics in AGM epistemology of logical abduction and of their connection. In Sect. 3 several operations for theory change proposed by Schurz (2011; 2018) are presented, followed by my own proposal of a further case of hypothesis (...) refinement, consisting of the instantiation of an existential abduction. Section 4 offers a discussion and conclusions. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo aquí­ es dilucidar algunos aspectos de la lógica de la investigación de Popper y situarla en la discusión filosófica del descubrimiento cientí­fico. Un análisis más cercano de su propuesta revela que su obra, a la luz de textos más recientes, sí­ apunta en la dirección de algunos mecanismos fundamentales que caen en el rubro del estudio del descubrimiento. El argumento en favor de esta tesis tiene dos partes: por un lado, cuando se hace un análisis más fino (...) de los contextos de investigación, parece que la lógica de Popper puede ser considerada como parte del contexto de descubrimiento, y, por el otro, su explicación sobre el crecimiento del conocimiento mediante el método de conjeturas y refutaciones coincide con la corriente dominante de los llamados "œAmigos del descubrimiento", al menos en lo que respecta a la obra de Herbert Simon.: The aim of this paper is to elucidate some aspects of Karl Popper"™s logic of research and place it in the philosophical discussion of scientific discovery. A closer look into his proposal reveals that his work, in the light of recent literature, does point into the direction of some fundamental mechanisms which fall under the study of discovery. The argument for this claim is twofold: one the one hand, when a finer analysis of contexts of research is done, it seems that Popper"™s logic may be considered as part of the context of discovery, and on the other hand, his account on the growth of knowledge by the method of conjectures and refutations, is in accordance with the "œFriends of Discovery" mainstream, at least is so far as the work of Herbert Simon is concerned. (shrink)

In this text, I put forward the thesis that creativity and logic do not exclude each other. I depart from the characterization of a creative product as that which is novel and useful. I presuppose there is some kind of method for generating that new product, and in this respect, I rely on Peirce’s formulation of abduction. A central point to be discussed concerns whether Peirces’ abduction may be considered as a logic of synthetic reasoning; to what extent its products (...) are genuinely novel. In my defense of above’s thesis, I shall restrict to new scientific hypotheses generated from previous concepts. I consider that this modest analysis will nevertheless shed some light on the scope of this thesis. (shrink)

Theo AF Kuipers THE THREEFOLD EVALUATION OF THEORIES A SYNOPSIS OF FROM INSTRUMENTALISM TO CONSTRUCTIVE REALISM. ON SOME RELATIONS BETWEEN CONFIRMATION, EMPIRICAL PROGRESS, AND TRUTH APPROXIMATION (2000) ABSTRACT.

This book is the first of two volumes devoted to the work of Theo Kuipers, a leading Dutch philosopher of science. Philosophers and scientists from all over the world, thirty seven in all, comment on Kuipers' philosophy, and each of their commentaries is followed by a reply from Kuipers. The present volume focuses on Kuipers' views on confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation, as laid down in his From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (Kluwer, 2000). In this book, Kuipers offered a (...) synthesis of Carnap's and Hempel's confirmation theory on the one hand, and Popper's theory of truth approximation on the other. The key element of this synthesis is a sophisticated methodology, which enables the evaluation of theories in terms of their problems and successes (even if the theories are already falsified), and which also fits well with the claim that one theory is closer to the truth than another. Ilkka Niiniluoto, Patrick Maher, John Welch, Gerhard Schurz, Igor Douven, Bert Hamminga, David Miller, Johan van Benthem, Sjoerd Zwart, Thomas Mormann, Jesús Zamora Bonilla, Isabella Burger & Johannes Heidema, Joke Meheus, Hans Mooij, and Diderik Batens comment on these ideas of Kuipers, and many present their own account. The present book also contains a synopsis of From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. It can be read independently of the second volume of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, which is devoted to Kuipers' Structures in Science (2001). (shrink)

This book is the second of two volumes devoted to the work of Theo Kuipers, a leading Dutch philosopher of science. Philosophers and scientists from all over the world, thirty seven in all, comment on Kuipers’ philosophy, and each of their commentaries is followed by a reply from Kuipers. The present volume is devoted to Kuipers’ neo-classical philosophy of science, as laid down in his Structures in Science . Kuipers defends a dialectical interaction between science and philosophy in that he (...) views philosophy of science as a meta-science which formulates cognitive structures that provide heuristic patterns for actual scientific research, including design research. In addition, Kuipers pays considerable attention to the computational approaches to philosophy of science as well as to the ethics of doing research. Thomas Nickles, David Atkinson, Jean-Paul van Bendegem, Maarten Franssen, Anne Ruth Mackor, Arno Wouters, Erik Weber & Helena de Preester, Eric Scerri, Adam Grobler & Andrzej Wisniewski, Alexander van den Bosch, Gerard Vreeswijk, Jaap Kamps, Paul Thagard, Emma Ruttkamp, Robert Causey, Henk Zandvoort comment on these ideas of Kuipers, and many present their own account. The present book also contains a synopsis of Structures in Science. It can be read independently of the first volume of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, which is devoted to Kuipers’ From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. (shrink)

The formalization of abductive reasoning has received increasing attention from logicians. However, few work is found beyond abduction in propositional logic, given that in a first order formalism, the undecidability problem naturally appears, and therefore an abductive problem cannot even be appropriately formulated. Still, many applications in artificial intelligence allow finite domains to work with, and this gives an opportunity to apply abduction in first order logic with restricted domains. In this paper, we present an approach to abductive reasoning in (...) C-structures, first order structures with a finite domain in which each of its elements has a corresponding constant representing its interpretation. By using semantic tableaux with bounded depth, that is, C-tableaux (a modification of N-tableaux, introduced by the authors in previous papers) and δ-resolution calculus, we build an effective procedure for the searching of minimal abductive solutions within the proposed semantics. (shrink)

This papers presents δ-resolution, a dual resolution calculus. It is based on standard resolution, and used appropriate formulae equivalent to disjunctive normal forms, instead of conjunctive normal ones, as it is the case for resolution. This duality is then useful to create a calculus for abductive process, as a way to construct a set of abductive solutions. The proposed calculus is compared to semantic tableaux, an standard logical framework, aslo illuminating when studying abduction.δ-resolution calculus is a contribution to logic programming, (...) and it further suggests new possibilities to explore abduction at a first order level, in the lines of those proposed in [9]. (shrink)

Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation is a much awaited original contribution to the study of abductive reasoning, providing logical foundations and a rich sample of pertinent applications. Divided into three parts on the conceptual framework, the logical foundations, and the applications, this monograph takes the reader for a comprehensive and erudite tour through the taxonomy of abductive reasoning, via the logical workings of abductive inference ending with applications pertinent to scientific explanation, empirical progress, pragmatism and belief revision.

This paper primarily deals with the conceptual prospects for generalizing the aim of abduction from the standard one of explaining surprising or anomalous observations to that of empirical progress or even truth approximation. It turns out that the main abduction task then becomes the instrumentalist task of theory revision aiming at an empirically more successful theory, relative to the available data, but not necessarily compatible with them. The rest, that is, genuine empirical progress as well as observational, referential and theoretical (...) truth approximation, is a matter of evaluation and selection, and possibly new generation tasks for further improvement. The paper concludes with a survey of possible points of departure, in AI and logic, for computational treatment of the instrumentalist task guided by the ‘comparative evaluation matrix’. (shrink)

This is an examination of similarities and differences between two recent models of abductive reasoning. The one is developed in Atocha Aliseda’s Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into the Processes of Discovery and Evaluation (2006). The other is advanced by Dov Gabbay and the present author in their The Reach of Abduction: Insight and Trial (2005). A principal difference between the two approaches is that in the Gabbay-Woods model, but not in the Aliseda model, abductive inference is ignorance-preserving. (...) A further differ-ence is that Aliseda reconstructs the abduction relation in a semantic tableaux environment, whereas the Woods-Gabbay model, while less systematic, is more general. Of particular note is the connection between abduction and legal reasoning. (shrink)

This is an examination of similarities and differences between Atocha Aliseda's semantic tableaux analysis of abduction and Dov Gabbay's and the present author's ignorance-preservation model of it. Also discussed is the suitability of these models for the analysis of the logical structure of legal reasoning.

This is an examination of similarities and differences between Atocha Aliseda’s semantic tableaux analysis of abduction and Dov Gabbay’s and the present author’s ignorance-preservation model of it. Also discussed is the suitability of these models for the analysis of the logical structure of legal reasoning.

Atocha Aliseda gives in Abductive Reasoning (2006) a structural characterization of the forward explanatory reasoning from a theory to observational data. This paper discusses the converse problem of giving structural rules for the backward abductive reasoning from observations to explanatory theories.

Atocha Aliseda’s Abductive Reasoning (2006) gives a structural characterization of the “forward” explana-tory reasoning from a theory to observational data. This paper asks whether there are any interesting structural rules for the “backward” abductive reasoning from observations to explanatory theories. Ignoring statistical cases, a partial explication of abduction is converse deductive explanation: h is abducible from e iff h deductively explains e. This relation of abducibility trivially satisfies Converse Entailment (if h entails e, then h is abducible from (...) e ), but it does not generally satisfy Converse Consequence (if h is abducible from e and g entails h, then g is abducible from e ), since deductive explanation is not always transitive. (shrink)

In this paper art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, are presented as a field whose conjectural paradigm can be used to understand the epistemic problems associated with abduction. In order to do so, significant statements, concepts and arguments from the work of several specialists in this field have been highlighted. Their analysis shows the fruitfulness and potential for understanding the study of visual culture as a field that is interwoven with the assumptions of abductive cognition.

Se explora la naturaleza de los problemas lacunae a partir del análisis de los conceptos elaborados, respectivamente, por Larry Laudan, Theo Kuipers y Atocha Aliseda. Sugeriré que los problemas lacunae pueden surgir del debilitamiento de la noción de ‘falsación empírica’ y repercutir en la noción de ‘implicación lógica’.

En este breve comentario, discuto dos aspectos, en mi opinión esenciales, del reciente libro de Atocha Aliseda sobre el razonamiento abductivo (Abductive Reasoning). El primero tiene que ver con la clasificación de la abducción propuesta por Aliseda respecto al tipo de lógica que le subyace. Sobre esto, considero que la mejor opción sería tal vez excluir la abducción de tal clasificación. El segundo se refiere al mecanismo de búsqueda de hipótesis abductivas que nos ofrece Aliseda (el (...) método computacional de los árboles semánti-cos extendidos). Sugiero que queda por establecerse la realidad psicológica de tal mecanismo.I discuss, in this brief commentary, two relevant aspects of Atocha Aliseda’s recent book on abductive reasoning (Abduc-tive Reasoning). The first has to do with Aliseda’s proposed classification of abduction with respect to the sort of logic under-lying it. I contend that perhaps the best option is to exclude abduction from this classification. The second aspect concerns the search mechanism for abductive hypotheses offered by Aliseda (the computational method of extended semantic tableaux). I suggest that its psychological reality has yet to be established. (shrink)

Discuto dos aspectos del reciente libro de Atocha Aliseda sobre el razonamiento abductivo. El primero tiene que ver con la clasificación de la abducción propuesta por Aliseda respecto al tipo de lógica que le subyace. El segundo se refiere al mecanismo de búsqueda de hipótesis abductivas que nos ofrece Aliseda.

In her book Abductive Reasoning Atocha Aliseda (2006) stresses the attention to the logical models of abduction, centering on the semantic tableaux as a method for extending and improving both the whole cognitive/philosophical view on it and on other more restricted logical approaches. I will provide further insight on two aspects. The first is re-lated to the importance of increasing logical knowledge on abduction: Aliseda clearly shows how the logical study on abduction in turn helps us to (...) extend and modernize the classical and received idea of logic. The second refers to some ideas coming from the so-called distributed cognition and concerns the role of logical models as forms of cognitive exter-nalizations of preexistent in-formal human reasoning performances. The logical externalization in objective systems, communicable and sharable, is able to grant stable perspectives endowed with symbolic, abstract, and rigorous cogni-tive features. I will also emphasize that Aliseda especially stresses that this character of stability and objectivity of logical achievements are not usually present in models of abduction that are merely cognitive and epistemological, and of ex-treme importance from the computational point of view. (shrink)

In her book Abductive Reasoning Atocha Aliseda (2006) stresses the attention to the logical models of abduction, centering on the semantic tableaux as a method for extending and improving both the whole cognitive/philosophical view on it and on other more restricted logical approaches. I will provide further insight on two aspects. The first is re-lated to the importance of increasing logical knowledge on abduction: Aliseda clearly shows how the logical study on abduction in turn helps us to (...) extend and modernize the classical and received idea of logic. The second refers to some ideas coming from the so-called distributed cognition and concerns the role of logical models as forms of cognitive exter-nalizations of preexistent in-formal human reasoning performances. The logical externalization in objective systems, communicable and sharable, is able to grant stable perspectives endowed with symbolic, abstract, and rigorous cogni-tive features. I will also emphasize that Aliseda especially stresses that this character of stability and objectivity of logical achievements are not usually present in models of abduction that are merely cognitive and epistemological, and of ex-treme importance from the computational point of view. (shrink)