Mechanizing skeptical abduction and its applications to artificial intelligence

Abstract

Abduction is the process of generating the best explanation as to why a fact is observed given what is already known. A real problem in this area is the selective generation of hypotheses that have some reasonable prospect of being valid. The author proposes the notion of skeptical abduction as a model to face this problem. After providing a definition of abductive reasoning, skeptical abduction and specific abduction are compared in a logical framework. The mechanism of abductive reasoning in propositional logic is investigated and its generalization to first-order logic is discussed.<>