Jumping to explanations versus jumping to conclusions

摘要

Abduction is usually defined as the process of inferring the best explanation of an observation. There are many information processing operations that can be viewed as a search for an explanation. For instance, diagnosis, natural language interpretation and plan recognition. This paper is concerned about the following aspects of abduction: (i) what are the logical properties of abduction when it is regarded as a form of inference? and (ii) how close is abduction to reversed deduction?