Transepistemic abduction: reasoning across epistemic domains
Andrew A. P. Gibson, Peter Bruza · Logic Journal of IGPL · 2019
Abstract Frequently people draw on different domains of knowledge to reach a conclusion that seems reasonable despite being difficult to justify from the perspective of a single domain. For example, there appears to be no reason for ethics to involve mathematics, nor is there a mechanism in mathematics to embrace moral questions; however, both ethics and mathematics are likely to be involved in resolving questions about how an autonomous vehicle should make decisions in a social context. In this paper, we present a specialized mode of reasoning, transepistemic abduction (TeA), which establishes how two agents, in order to satisfactorily explain a phenomenon, reason across two epistemic domains despite each agent being ignorant of the other’s domain knowledge. We formalize TeA with epistemic logic and provide a naturalized example that brings together a psychosocial agent and a computational agent for the analysis of subjective text. We find that interaction between agents is critical to the process of TeA and that there are limits to the formalization while remaining true to naturalized reasoning. We conclude with some important implications of these findings for future work in this area.