A study on the logic of abduction
Marta Cialdea Mayer, Fiora Pirri · 1996
. In this paper we present a logic for abduction, namely a language, a semantics and a proof theory where the abductive relation can be expressed. The abductive relation is the relation between a preferred sentence explaining a given observation, in the context of a background theory, and such an observation itself. The proposed logical system, based on a modal approach, captures propositional abduction over a finite language. 1 INTRODUCTION Abduction is a natural form of reasoning performed by an agent when new evidence informs her knowledge and it consists in inferring the truth of a sentence, from the fact that it would explain the new evidence. In general there may be different sentences explaining the same evidence, so alternative ones have to be rejected before the inference is performed. In other terms the inference is drawn when the agent is convinced that any other sentence is not plausible enough, compared with the chosen one, to be accepted as an explanation. In the classi...