Ben, list,
Thanks for this message which includes the findings of your most recent research into abduction, an area I know is of considerable interest to you, and one which seems especially important for inquiry, Peircean or otherwise.
That what you called "strategic" abduction has been a proposal to extend logic programming through a plan "that entails the planning goal" rang some bells for me. (I seem to recall hearing something about this in connection with some AI project at a workshop of ICCS one year; I'll have to see if I can hunt up any of that material.)
At least as interesting, and closely connected to it, I think, is your suggestion--supported by the Peirce quotation you gave at the end of your post--that in abduction the rule can be (in some cases) but "alluded to" or, as Peirce wrote, "no new law is suggested, but only a peculiar state of facts that will "explain" the surprising phenomenon; and a law already known is recognized as applicable to the suggested hypothesis, so that the phenomenon, under that assumption, would not be surprising, but quite likely, or even would be a necessary result."
So, comparing these two notions, if a plan "entails the planning goal" then that goal must, necessarily, be known, just as "no new law" or rule is necessarily needed, "and a law already known is recognized as applicable to the suggested hypothesis." At the moment these notions seem, contradictorily, to both clarify and complicate the idea of abduction for me. But, then, as you noted, perhaps we should follow Peirce's lead and begin to imagine that "one shouldn't be too rigid about the rules with abduction." Still, thinking through abduction, in such ways as you've been doing recently, seems to me to be important research which can only eventually help to clarify the role of abduction in inquiry.
Best,
Gary
>>> "Benjamin Udell" <budell <at> nyc.rr.com> 8/2/2010 5:45 PM >>>
Gary, list,
It turns out that my idea of a "strategic" abduction is not original. (Just as well!). From pp. 1-2, "Abduction in Logic Programming," Marc Denecker and Antonis Kakas, Department of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium, perhaps not formally published, I can't find the year.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.13.7065
In the context of logic programming, the study of abductive inference started at the end of the eighties as an outcome of different attempts to use logic programming for solving AI-problems. Facing the limitations of standard logic programming for solving these problems, different researchers proposed to extend logic programming with abduction. Eshghi [28] introduced abduction in logic programming in order to solve planning problems in the Event Calculus [65]. In this approach, abduction solves a planning goal by _explaining_ it by an ordered sets of events - a plan - that entails the planning goal. This approach was further explored by Shanahan [110], Missiaen et al. [72, 71], Denecker [21], Jung [48] and recently in [59, 60]. Kakas and Mancarella showed the application of abduction in logic programming for deductive database updating and knowledge assimilation [53, 55]. The application of abduction to diagnosis has been studied in [10, 11] within an abductive logic programming framework whose semantics was defined by a suitable extension of the completion semantics of LP. [yellow background added - BU]
I should also make a semi-correction, regarding what I said about a norm's or rule's being "alluded to" (by the word "course") in Peirce's 1903 form. One way or another, that does happen, though the rule in question may be a rule merely of 1st-order logic. Putting the 1903 form into correspondence with the earlier categorical-syllogistic form makes it seem that a rule is something to which the abduction only alludes:
The surprising fact (result), C, is observed;
But if A (case) were true, C (result) would be a matter of course (rule, but only alluded-to),
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A (case) is true.
However, as Peirce came to say, one shouldn't be too rigid about the rules with abduction, especially when that leads one to misdirect one's attention. Much less should one focus too rigidly on corresondences which one asserts to hold between various abductive forms, as if that would always be the main focus of attention in the analysis of abductions. Above in the 1903 form, that which I labeled "(case)" may itself be substantially a rule or norm. Now, that was always so, even with the categorical syllogisms, e.g., Barbara: All mammals are animals (rule), all horses are mammals (case which is itself a rule), ergo all horses are animals (result which itself is a rule). However, a rule which one uses to help explain a phenomenon may be already acknowledged (the alluded-to rule) and combined with some peculiar state of facts ("A," which I correlated to case) or instead, the explanatory rule may be newly hypothesized ("A," case, now itself a rule or norm, hypothesized). Or, I think, one could make "A" stand for the combination of a peculiar state of facts and an acknowledged rule (and then "course" could refer to a more simply logical rule) and so on. From "A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic", EP 2:287, 1903,
http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/abduction.html :
The whole operation of reasoning begins with _Abduction_, which is now to be descibed. Its occasion is a _surprise_. That is, some belief, active or passive, formulated or unformulated, has just been broken up. It may be in real experience or it may equally be in pure mathematics, which has its marvels, as nature has. The mind seeks to bring the facts, as modified by the new discovery, into order; that is, to form a general conception embracing them. In some cases, it does this by an act of _generalization_. In other cases, no new law is suggested, but only a peculiar state of facts that will "explain" the surprising phenomenon; and a law already known is recognized as applicable to the suggested hypothesis, so that the phenomenon, under that assumption, would not be surprising, but quite likely, or even would be a necessary result. This synthesis suggesting a new conception or hypothesis, is the Abduction. [....]
Best, Ben
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