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- John R. Josephson & Susan G. Josephson (1994). Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. Cambridge University Press.In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. It is a common occurrence in everyday life and crops up in such diverse places as medical diagnosis, scientific theory formation, accident investigation, language understanding, and jury deliberation. In recent years, it has become a popular and fruitful topic in artificial intelligence research. This volume breaks new ground in the scientific, philosophical, and technological study of abduction. It presents new ideas about inferential and information-processing foundations for knowledge and certainty. The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast to the view that it arises non-inferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. Much AI research is hypothetical, so the importance of this book is that it reports key discoveries about abduction that have been made as a result of designing, building, testing, and analyzing actual working knowledge-based systems for medical diagnosis and other abductive tasks. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines, RED-1, RED-2, PEIRCE, MDX2, TIPS, QUAWDS, and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. The final chapter argues that perception is logically abductive and presents a layered-abduction computational model of perceptual information processing. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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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.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Biographical studies have shown that visual mental imagery plays a significant role in the conduct of scientific research, particularly in the generation of hypotheses. But the nature of visual mental imagery and its participation in abductive inference is not systematically understood. This paper discusses examples of visual abductive reasoning by archaeologists, analyzing them according to the visual information and the process of inference employed. This work supports the conclusion that visual abduction is useful to scientists under certain conditions and that it is amenable to detailed study.
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| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction." He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause," and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis." Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of analysis), have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is interpreted as giving reasons for pursuing a hypothesis. Inference to the best explanation (IBE) has also been regarded as an important mode of justification, both in everyday life, detective stories, and science. In particular, scientific realism has been defended by an abductive nomiracle argument (Smart, Putnam, Boyd), while the critics of realism have attempted to show that this appeal to abduction is question-begging, circular, or incoherent (Fine, Laudan, van Fraassen). This paper approaches these issues by distinguishing weaker and stronger forms of abduction, and by showing how these types of inferences can be given Peircean and Bayesian probabilistic reconstructions.
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| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Abductive reasoning takes place in forming``hypotheses'''' in order to explain ``facts.'''' Thus, theconcept of abduction promises an understanding ofcreativity in science and learning. It raises,however, also a lot of problems. Some of them will bediscussed in this paper. After analyzing thedifference between induction and abduction (1), Ishall discuss Peirce''s claim that there is a ``logic''''of abduction (2). The thesis is that this claim can beunderstood, if we make a clear distinction between inferential elements and perceptive elements of abductive reasoning. For Peirce, the creative act offorming explanatory hypotheses and the emergence of``new ideas'''' belongs exclusively to the perceptive side of abduction. Thus, it is necessary to study the roleof perception in abductive reasoning (3). A furtherproblem is the question whether there is arelationship between abduction and Peirce''s concept of``theorematic reasoning'''' in mathematics (4). Both forms of reasoning could be connected, because both arebased on perception. The last problem concerns therole of instincts in explaining the success ofabductive reasoning in science, and the question whether the concept of instinct might be replaced bymethods of inquiry (5).
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... One of our purposes here is to expose something of the elementary logical structure of abductive reasoning, and to do so in a way that helps orient theorists to the various tasks that a logic of abduction should concern itself with. We are mindful of criticisms that have been levelled against the very idea of a logic of abduction; so we think it prudent to proceed with a certain diffidence. That our own account of abduction is itself abductive is methodological expression of this diffi- dence. A second objective is to test our conception of abduction’s logical structure against some of the more promising going accounts of abductive reasoning. We offer our various suggestions in a benignly advisory way. The primary targets of our advice is ourselves, meant as guides to work we have yet to complete or, in some instances, start. It is possible that our colleagues in the abduction research communities will find our counsel to be of some interest. But we repeat that our first concern is to try to get ourselves straight about what a logic of abduction should encompass.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Essential to Peirce's distinction among three kinds of reasoning, deduction, induction and abduction, is the claim that each is correlated to a unique species of validity irreducible to that of the others. In particular, abductive validity cannot be analyzed in either deductive or inductive terms, a consequence of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods. But when the full structure of abductive argumentation — as viewed by the mature Peirce — is clarified, every inferential step in the process can be seen to dissolve into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, the final stage is a special type of practical inference which, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, surprisingly, is not inferential at all. In neither is abduction a type of inference to the best explanation. The result is a major reassessment of the relevance of Peirce's views to contemporary methodological studies.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The motivation behind the collection of papers presented in this THEORIA forum on Abductive reasoning is my book Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into the Processes of Discovery and Explanation. These contributions raise fundamental questions. One of them concerns the conjectural character of abduction. The choice of a logical framework for abduction is also discussed in detail, both its inferential aspect and search strategies. Abduction is also analyzed as inference to the best explanation, as well as a process of epistemic change, both of which chal-lenge the argument-like format of abduction. Finally, the psychological question of whether humans reason abduc-tively according to the models proposed is also addressed. I offer a brief summary of my book and then comment on and respond to several challenges that were posed to my work by the contributors to this issue.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Peirce presented early formulations of abductive inference nearly 150 years ago. Since then new interpretations have been presented (some of them quite independently of Peirce), but there is still a close link to Peirce’s formulations. Lorenzo Magnani has written a new book on abduction where the main theme is not Peirce’s interpretation of abduction as such, but the book is very interesting from the Peircean perspective. In this review I shall focus on some of the themes from this point of view. Magnani presents a broad view on abduction instead of presenting only one specific interpretation of abduction. This reflects the history of abduction. Peirce’s writings themselves give elements for various ..
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| | Other links: muse.jhu.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... There are various ``classical'' arguments against abduction as a logic of discovery,especially that (1) abduction is too weak a mode of inference to be of any use, and (2) in basic formulation of abduction the hypothesisis already presupposed to be known, so it is not the way hypotheses are discovered in the first place. In this paper I argue, by bringing forth the idea of strategies,that these counter-arguments are weaker than may appear. The concept of strategies suggests, inter alia, that many inferential moves are taken into account at the same time. This is especially important in abductive reasoning, which is basically a very weak mode of inference. The importance of strategic thinking can already be seen in Charles S.Peirce's early treatments of the topic, and N.R.Hanson's later writings on abduction although they did not use the concept of``strategies.'' On the whole, I am arguing that the focus should be more on methodological processes, and not only on validity considerations, which have dominated the discussion about abduction.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This paper discusses abductive reasoning---that is, reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated. First, it criticizes two recent formal logical models of abduction. An adequate formalization would have to take into account the following aspects of abduction: explanation is not deduction; hypotheses are layered; abduction is sometimes creative; hypotheses may be revolutionary; completeness is elusive; simplicity is complex; and abductive reasoning may be visual and non-sentential. Second, in order to illustrate visual aspects of hypothesis formation, the paper describes recent work on visual inference in archaeology. Third, in connection with the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, the paper describes recent results on the computation of coherence.
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| | Other links: cogprints.org cogsci.uwaterloo.ca | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of John R. Josephson & Susan G. Josephson, Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology
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