Abstract
There are many answers to the question “What is abduction?”. In fact, there are too many answers to this question. This paper does not add to this multitude. Instead, after outlining the landscape of conceptual frameworks for abduction, the author advocates for a specific shift in perspective, resulting in a focus on the use of abductive reasoning instead of its definition. If the practicality of abduction is taken seriously, the evaluation of hypotheses becomes an intrinsic part of abductive reasoning. While not obvious from a philosophical point of view, this stance is quite natural from the computational one: aiming at computational tractability of abduction must be inherently connected with limiting the space of possible solutions, ultimately with searching for the good ones, if not the best. Hence, making the criteria for evaluating abductive hypotheses precise and workable becomes one of the crucial issues in modeling abduction. Thus, this chapter addresses the issue of criteria employed to evaluate abductive hypotheses expressed in terms of formal logical systems and then presents three approaches to how such criteria may be put to work and how the evaluation process relates to the generation of abductive hypotheses. Based on analytic tableaux, the first one exemplifies a strict separation of generation and evaluation of hypotheses. The second, the Abductive Question-Answer System, rooted in a logic of questions, illustrates the opposite idea of generation and evaluation being inseparably intertwined. Finally, the mixed case allows for computational tractability of evaluating large sets of abductive hypotheses, in which hypotheses are generated using the Synthetic Tableaux Method and evaluation is based on reduction techniques and multicriterial dominance relation.
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Acknowledgements
Research reported in this paper was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (DEC-2013/10/E/HS1/00172).
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Urbański, M. (2022). Evaluation of Abductive Hypotheses: A Logical Perspective. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_23-1
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