Including the power of interpretation through a simulation of Peirce's process of inquiry

Abstract

The importance of abductive reasoning is increasingly emphasized within diverse research domains in which interpretation plays a central role. This reasoning type appears to provide an answer to various significant issues in diverse domains, especially in combination with deductive and inductive reasoning, as C. S. Peirce eventually presented it in his process of (scientific) inquiry. Central to our interpretation of Peirce's process of inquiry, thus stands a cycle of abductive, deductive, and inductive reasoning, which is iterated continuously with the surrounding world as its subject. This world here is understood as the environment that surrounds us and that we experience through our senses. The continuous iteration of Peirce's process of inquiry allows constructing experience-based knowledge dynamically. This kind of knowledge comes closer to the dynamic memory and reasoning that is required for active interpretation. Issues that might be better understood and addressed accordingly involve not only interpretation but also idea generation, creativity, surprise, and so forth. This article documents a part of our efforts in simulating such a reasoning cycle using currently available technologies. Diverse hypotheses and conclusions have been made in these simulation efforts. For instance, we hypothesize that Peirce's reasoning cycle might be configured in reasoning levels, with each level handling information or patterns in different levels of invariance and meaning. These efforts have resulted in an environment in which a reasoning agent processes basic colour information and gradually builds up interpretations of such colours based on incoming information.