Abductive Inference

Edited by John R. Josephson and Susan G. Josephson
1994, New York, Cambridge University Press

John R. Josephson
Susan G. Josephson
Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
Computer Science and Engineering Department
The Ohio State University

306 pp.       6x9"

Hardback      ISBN 0-521-43461-0

Figures - 59  $49.95

1-800-872-7423 -- Ordering from U.S.

44-223-325970 -- from Europe

Abduction is inference to the best explanation, a pattern of reasoning that occurs in such diverse places as medical diagnostics, scientific theory formulation, accident investigation, language understanding, and jury deliberation. This book breaks new ground in the scientific, philosophical, and technological study of abduction. It presents new ideas about the inferential and information-processing foundations of knowledge and certainty. It argues that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast with the view that knowledge arises noninferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are sufficient to account for knowledge

Abductive Inference reports key discoveries about abduction that were made as a result of designing, building, testing, and analyzing knowledge-based systems fro medical diagnosis and other abductive tasks. These systems demonstrate that abductive inference can be described precisely enough to achieve good performance, even though this description lies largely outside the classical formal frameworks of mathematical logic and probability.

The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. Finally, the book argues that perception is logically abductive and presents a layered-abduction computational model of perceptual information processing.

This book is about abduction, "the logic of Sherlock Holmes," and about how some kinds of abductive reasoning can be programmed in a computer. The work brings together artificial intelligence and philosophy of science and is rich with implications for other areas such as: psychology, medical informatics, and linguistics. It also has subtle implications for evidence evaluation in areas such as accident investigation, confirmation of scientific theories, law, diagnosis, and financial auditing. The book is about certainty and the logico-computational foundations of knowledge; it's about inference in perception, reasoning strategies, and building expert systems.