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From: valdes+@cs.cmu.edu (Raul Valdes-Perez)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Abductive Reasoning
Message-ID: <1991May5.175755.24614@cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 5 May 91 17:57:55 GMT
References: <1991May3.181328.16368@cs.ubc.ca>
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Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
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In article <1991May3.181328.16368@cs.ubc.ca> kean@cs.ubc.ca (Alex Kean) writes:
>After working on so call "abductive reasoning" for a while, I am
>beginning to wonder about the meaning of the term "abductive
>reasoning"  and its historical reason for such name.  

I would suggest some selective reading in Charles S. Peirce, "Essays in the 
Philosophy of Science," American Heritage Series, 1957.

I did some reading there, and discovered quite muddled uses of the term
abduction by Peirce.  In one essay he seems to mean one thing, and in a
second he means another.  Peirce introduced the term because he wanted to 
speak of scientific processes other than "induction," understood as merely 
formulating generalized laws from data.  For example, he wished to discuss 
the proposal of explanatory theories, such as theories that provide a physical 
mechanism giving rise to observed data, in which data are qualitatively quite 
distinct from theory.  Such an abduction would be the proposal of the mechanism
underlying blood circulation in the body, starting from data on blood 
properties, what happens when an artery is artifically constricted by a 
tight knot (you get a bulge on one side but not the other), etc.

Peirce also used synonyms for `abduction,' such as the `method of hypothesis.'

Raul E. Valdes-Perez			valdes@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science		(412) 268-7698
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
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"There are many other advantages of the distinction in question
which I shall leave the reader to find out by experience."  (Peirce)



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