Abstract
This paper discusses abductive reasoning—that is, reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated. First, it criticizes two recent formal logical models of abduction. An adequate formalization would have to take into account the following aspects of abduction: explanation is not deduction; hypotheses are layered; abduction is sometimes creative; hypotheses may be revolutionary; completeness is elusive; simplicity is complex; and abductive reasoning may be visual and non-sentential. Second, in order to illustrate visual aspects of hypothesis formation, the paper describes recent work on visual inference in archaeology. Third, in connection with the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, the paper describes recent results on the computation of coherence.
We are grateful to John Josephson and Don Roberts for comments on an earlier draft. Thanks to John Ching and Andrew Wong for ideas about graphical representations. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Thagard, P., Shelley, C. (1997). Abductive Reasoning: Logic, Visual Thinking, and Coherence. In: Dalla Chiara, M.L., Doets, K., Mundici, D., van Benthem, J. (eds) Logic and Scientific Methods. Synthese Library, vol 259. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0487-8_22
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