Use of current explanations in multicausal abductive reasoning

Use of Current Explanations in Multicausal Abductive Reasoning Use of Current Explanations in Multicausal Abductive Reasoning

In multicausal abductive tasks a person must explain some findings by assembling a composite hypothesis that consists of one or more elementary hypotheses. If there are n elementary hypotheses, there can be up to 2 composite hypotheses. To constrain the search for hypotheses to explain a new observation, people sometimes use their current explanation—the previous evidence and their present comp...

Use of current explanations in multicausal abductive reasoning

A Measure of Arbitrariness in Abductive Explanations

We study the framework of abductive logic programming extended with integrity constraints. For this framework, we introduce a new measure of the simplicity of an explanation based on its degree of arbitrariness: the more arbitrary the explanation, the less appealing it is, with explanations having no arbitrariness — they are called constrained — being the preferred ones. In the paper, we study ...

Changing Explanations in the Face of Anomalous Data in Abductive Reasoning

The integration of anomalous data is an essential subprocess of abductive reasoning. We conzeptualize abductive reasoning 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 experiment we investigated the...

Role of Abductive Reasoning

Along with geographical and technological barriers, the barriers created by local and parochial techno-social systems have to be taken into consideration in order to make us truly nomadic. A key question in the near future is how the user of advanced mobile technology could be empowered to have more control over the multiple spaces he or she inhabits and the numerous boundary crossings that he ...