Abductive reasoning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a method of reasoning in which

one chooses the hypothesis that would, if true, best explain the relevant evidence.
Abductive reasoning starts from a set of accepted facts and infers to their most likely, or
best, explanations. The term abduction is also sometimes used to just mean the
generation of hypotheses to explain observations or conclusions, but the former
definition is more common both in philosophy and computing.

Contents

1 Deduction, induction, and abduction

2 Logic-based abduction
3 Set-cover abduction
4 History of the concept
5 Applications
6 References
7 Notes
8 See also

9 External links

Deduction, induction, and abduction

(see also logical reasoning)
Deduction
allows deriving b as a consequence of a. In other words, deduction is the process
of deriving the consequences of what is assumed. Given the truth of the
assumptions, a valid deduction guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
Induction
allows inferring some a from multiple instantiations of b when a entails b.
Induction is the process of inferring probable antecedents as a result of
observing multiple consequents.
Abduction
allows inferring a as an explanation of b. Because of this, abduction allows the
precondition a of a entails b to be inferred from the consequence b. Deduction
and abduction thus differ in the direction in which a rule like a entails b is
used for inference. As such abduction is formally equivalent to the logical
fallacy affirming the consequent or Post hoc ergo propter hoc, because there are
multiple possible explanations for b.
Unlike deduction and induction, abduction can produce results that are incorrect within
its formal system. However, it can still be useful as a heuristic, especially when
something is known about the likelihood of different causes for b.

Logic-based abduction
In logic, explanation is done from a logical theory T representing a domain and a set of
observations O. Abduction is the process of deriving a set of explanations of O
according to T and picking out one of those explanations. For E to be an explanation of
O according to T, it should satisfy two conditions:

O follows from E and T;

E is consistent with T.

In formal logic, O and E are assumed to be sets of literals. The two conditions for E
being an explanation of O according to theory T are formalized as:
;
is consistent.
Among the possible explanations E satisfying these two conditions, some other
condition of minimality is usually imposed to avoid irrelevant facts (not contributing to
the entailment of O) being included in the explanations. Abduction is then the process
that picks out some member of E. Criteria for picking out a member representing "the
best" explanation include the simplicity, the prior probability, or the explanatory power
of the explanation.
A proof theoretical abduction method for first order classical logic based on the sequent
calculus and a dual one, based on semantic tableaux (analytic tableaux) have been
proposed. The methods are sound and complete and work for full first order logic,
without requiring any preliminary reduction of formulae into normal forms. These
methods have also been extended to modal logic.
Abductive logic programming is a computational framework that extends normal logic
programming with abduction. It separates the theory T into two components, one of
which is a normal logic program, used to generate E by means of backward reasoning,
the other of which is a set of integrity constraints, used to filter the set of candidate
explanations.

Set-cover abduction
A different formalization of abduction is based on inverting the function that calculates
the visible effects of the hypotheses. Formally, we are given a set of hypotheses H and a
set of manifestations M; they are related by the domain knowledge, represented by a
function e that takes as an argument a set of hypotheses and gives as a result the
corresponding set of manifestations. In other words, for every subset of the hypotheses
, their effects are known to be e(H').
Abduction is performed by finding a set
such that
. In other
words, abduction is performed by finding a set of hypotheses H' such that their effects
e(H') include all observations M.

A common assumption is that the effects of the hypotheses are independent, that is, for
every
, it holds that
abduction can be seen as a form of set covering.

. If this condition is met,

History of the concept

This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be
challenged and removed. (February 2007)

Historically, Aristotle's use of the term epagoge has referred to a syllogism in which the
major premise is known to be true, but the minor premise is only probable.
The philosopher Charles Peirce introduced abduction into modern logic. In his works
before 1900, he mostly uses the term to mean the use of a known rule to explain an
observation, e.g., if it rains the grass is wet is a known rule used to explain that the
grass is wet. In other words, it would be more technically correct to say, "If the grass is
wet, the most probable explanation is that it recently rained."
He later used the term to mean creating new rules to explain new observations,
emphasizing that abduction is the only logical process that actually creates anything
new. Namely, he described the process of science as a combination of abduction,
deduction and induction, stressing that new knowledge is only created by abduction.
This is contrary to the common use of abduction in the social sciences and in artificial
intelligence, where the old meaning is used. Contrary to this use, Peirce stated that the
actual process of generating a new rule is not hampered by logic rules. Rather, he
pointed out that humans have an innate ability to infer correctly; possessing this ability
is explained by the evolutionary advantage it gives. Peirce's second use of 'abduction' is
most similar to induction.
Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher of science, wanted to grasp a logic explaining
how scientific discoveries take place. He used Peirce's notion of abduction for this [1].
Further development of the concept can be found in Peter Lipton's "Inference to the
Best Explanation" (Lipton, 1991).

Applications
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Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be
challenged and removed. (February 2007)

Applications in artificial intelligence include fault diagnosis, belief revision, and

automated planning. The most direct application of abduction is that of automatically
detecting faults in systems: given a theory relating faults with their effects and a set of
observed effects, abduction can be used to derive sets of faults that are likely to be the
cause of the problem.

Abduction can also be used to model automated planning [2]. Given a logical theory
relating action occurrences with their effects (for example, a formula of the event
calculus), the problem of finding a plan for reaching a state can be modeled as the
problem of abducting a set of literals implying that the final state is the goal state.
Belief revision, the process of adapting beliefs in view of new information, is another
field in which abduction has been applied. The main problem of belief revision is that
the new information may be inconsistent with the corpus of beliefs, while the result of
the incorporation cannot be inconsistent. This process can be done by the use of
abduction: once an explanation for the observation has been found, integrating it does
not generate inconsistency. This use of abduction is not straightforward, as adding
propositional formulae to other propositional formulae can only make inconsistencies
worse. Instead, abduction is done at the level of the ordering of preference of the
possible worlds.
In the philosophy of science, abduction has been the key inference method to support
scientific realism, and much of the debate about scientific realism is focused on whether
abduction is an acceptable method of inference.
In historical linguistics, abduction during language acquisition is often taken to be an
essential part of processes of language change such as reanalysis and analogy [3].

References

Awbrey, Jon, and Awbrey, Susan (1995), "Interpretation as Action: The Risk of
Inquiry", Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, 15, 40-52. Eprint

Edwards, Paul (1967, eds.), "The Encyclopedia of Philosophy," Macmillan

Publishing Co, Inc. & The Free Press, New York. Collier Macmillan Publishers,
London.

Eiter, T., and Gottlob, G. (1995), "The Complexity of Logic-Based Abduction,

Journal of the ACM, 42.1, 3-42.

Harman, Gilbert (1965). "The Inference to the Best Explanation," The

Philosophical Review 74:1, 88-95.

Josephson, John R., and Josephson, Susan G. (1995, eds.), Abductive Inference:
Computation, Philosophy, Technology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
UK.

Lipton, Peter. (2001). Inference to the Best Explanation, London: Routledge.

ISBN 0-415-24202-9.

Menzies, T. (1996), "Applications of Abduction: Knowledge-Level Modelling,

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45.3, 305-335.

Yu, Chong Ho (1994), "Is There a Logic of Exploratory Data Analysis?", Annual
Meeting of American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA,
April, 1994. :Eprint

Cialdea Mayer, Marta and Pirri, Fiora (1993) "First order abduction via tableau
and sequent calculi" Logic Jnl IGPL 1993 1: 99-117; doi:10.1093/jigpal/1.1.99.
[1]

Cialdea Mayer, Marta and Pirri, Fiora (1995) "Propositional Abduction in Modal
Logic", Logic Jnl IGPL 1995 3: 907-919; doi:10.1093/jigpal/3.6.907 [2]

Notes
1. ^ Schwendtner, Tibor and Ropolyi, Lszl and Kiss, Olga (eds): Hermeneutika
s a termszettudomnyok. ron Kiad, Budapest, 2001. It is written in
Hungarian. Meaning of the title: Hermeneutics and the natural sciences.
2. ^ Kave Eshghi. Abductive planning with the event calculus. In Robert A.
Kowalski, Kenneth A. Bowen editors: Logic Programming, Proceedings of the
Fifth International Conference and Symposium, Seattle, Washington, August 1519, 1988. MIT Press 1988, ISBN 0-262-61056-6
3. ^ April M. S. McMahon (1994): Understanding language change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44665-1

See also

Analogy
Charles Peirce
Charles Peirce (Bibliography)
Deductive reasoning
Defeasible reasoning
Gregory Bateson
Inductive reasoning
Inquiry
List of thinking-related topics
Logic
Logical reasoning
Sign relation
Scientific method
Portal:thinking

External links

Josephson, John, "Abductive Inference in Reasoning and Perception", Webpage

Ryder, Martin, Instructional Technology Connections: Abduction, Webpage
Magnani, Lorenzo, Abduction, Reason, and Science. Processes of Discovery and
Explanation, Webpage
[it] Magnani, Lorenzo

Chapter 3. Deduction, Induction, and Abduction in article Charles Sanders

Peirce of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of
Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.