Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!MIMSY.UMD.EDU!venu From: venu@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (Venugopala R. Dasigi) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Construal of Induction Message-ID: <19880613194835.1.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 13 Jun 88 19:48:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 60 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu From: Venugopala R. Dasigi Date: Fri, 10 Jun 88 15:53 EDT To: comp-ai-digest@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Construal of Induction Responding-System: mimsy.UUCP Path: mimsy!venu From: venu@mimsy.UUCP (Venugopala R. Dasigi) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: construal of induction Message-ID: <11908@mimsy.UUCP> Date: 10 Jun 88 19:53:36 GMT References: <19880609224213.9.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU> Reply-To: venu@mimsy.umd.edu.UUCP (Venugopala R. Dasigi) Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 43 In an earlier article Raul Valdes-Perez writes: >The concept of induction has various construals, it seems. The one I am >comfortable with is that induction refers to any form of ampliative >reasoning, i.e. reasoning that draws conclusions which could be false >despite the premises being true. This construal is advanced by Wesley >Salmon in the little book Foundations of Scientific Inference. Accordingly, >any inference is, by definition, inductive xor deductive. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >I realize that this distinction is not universal. For example, some would >distinguish categories of induction. I would appreciate reading comments >on this topic in AILIST. I think it was Charles Sanders Peirce who made the distinction between three types of resoning: induction, deduction and abduction. (Also, Harry Pople's famous paper on "The Mechanization of Abductive Logic," Proc. IJCAI, 1973, pp 147-152 mentions this. Consider the following three possible components of reasoning: 1. A --> B 2. A 3. B (e.g., 1. All beans in this bag are white. 2. This bean is from this bag. 3. This bean is white.) Deduction involves inferring 3 from 1 and 2. Induction involves inferring 1 from 2 and 3. Abduction invloves inferring 2 from 1 and 3. (This was the way Peirce characterized the three types of logic.) Now, my point is abduction also involves drawing conclusions which could be false despite the premises being true, but that is not commonly construed as a type of induction. Accordingly, I am not comfortable with the statement that any inference is inductive XOR deductive (exclusive, all right, but not necessarily exhaustive). I admit I have to read Salmon's book, though. --- Venu Dasigi -- Venugopala Rao Dasigi ARPA: venu@mimsy.umd.edu CSNet: venu@umcp-cs/venu@mimsy.umd.edu UUCP: {allegra,brl-bmd}!mimsy!venu@uunet.uu.net US Mail: Dept. of CS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-3255