Changing Explanations in the Face of Anomalous Data in Abductive Reasoning
Martin R. K. Baumann, Franziska Bocklisch, Katja Mehlhorn, Josef F. Krems · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2007
The integration of anomalous data is an essential subprocess of abductive reasoning.Abductive reasoning is viewed as a comprehension process by which observations are sequentially interpreted and explained in relation to existing knowledge.This emphasizes the importance of the reasoner's knowledge structure also for the reaction to anomalous data.In this paper we investigated the effect of the specificity of anomalous data, that is whether they are related to only one category of causes or to different categories, on how hypotheses are changed to solve an anomaly.The results show that the specificity of observations facilitates the abductive reasoning process, especially in cases where the category of hypotheses must be changed.