title: Abductive reasoning: Logic, visual thinking, and coherence
creator: Thagard, P.
creator: Shelley, C. P.
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Artificial Intelligence
subject: Philosophy of Science
description: 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.
publisher: Dordrecht: Kluwer
contributor: Chiara, M-L. Dalla
date: 1997
type: Book Chapter
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: text/html
identifier: http://cogprints.org/671/1/FAbductive.html
identifier:   Thagard, P. and Shelley, C. P.  (1997) Abductive reasoning: Logic, visual thinking, and coherence.  [Book Chapter]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/671/