An Abductive Model for Human Reasoning
Steffen Hölldobler, Tobias Philipp, Christoph Wernhard · 2011
In this paper we contribute to bridging the gap between human reasoning as studied in Cognitive Science and commonsense reasoning based on formal logics and formal theories. In particular, the suppression task studied in Cognitive Science provides an interesting challenge problem for human reasoning based on logic. The work presented in the paper is founded on the recent approach by Stenning and van Lambalgen to model human reasoning by means of logic programs with a specific three-valued completion semantics and a semantic fixpoint operator that yields a least model, as well as abduction. Their approach has been subsequently made more precise and technically accurate by switching to three-valued Łukasiewicz logic. In this paper, we extend this refined approach by abduction. We show that the inclusion of abduction permits to adequately model additional empiric results reported from Cognitive Science. For the arising abductive reasoning tasks we give complexity results. Finally, we outline several open research issues that emerge from the application of logic to model human reasoning. 1