Inductive Reasoning is Sometimes Deductive
Éric Grégoire, Eric Gr, L Sais · 1996
. In this position paper, some differences between inductive reasoning and abduction are investigated. From an epistemological point of view, abductive reasoning is related to the non-deductive inference of explanations (which are often required to be basic facts) that, together with some background theory, allow a specific observation to be deduced or nonmonotonically inferred. In the machine learning field, an important family of inductive reasonings consists in inferring rules that generalize a series of examples. In this paper, the focus is laid on a distinction between both forms of reasoning that is traced back to one possible nature of generalization. More precisely, this nature together with properties linking deduction and induction are used to show that generalization from examples is sometimes performed just using deduction, although the resulting process is correctly interpreted as inductive reasoning. On the contrary, most authors would not classify the logically correspon...