Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology

Description

In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. This volume 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 noninferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science.

'This book is rich in detail and worthy of study either by those interested in the computational problems of abduction or by those interested in the transformation of philosophical questions about knowledge into 'technical questions about the performance of information-processing systems'. David Green, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 'The book provides a good general introduction to the effort of building abductive systems ...'. Hilan Bensusan, AISB Quarterly