Notion Of Abduction Research Articles

A LOGICAL CHARACTERIZATION FOR TRUTH MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS WITH DEPENDENCY‐DIRECTED BACKTRACKING

In this paper we present various logical characterizations of justification‐based (nonmonotonic) truth maintenance systems (JTMS). These characterizations, which are proved to be equivalent, aim at describing dependency‐directed backtracking (DDB) (i.e., the process of resolving conflicts which can arise when nogoods are allowed in the set of justifications), mainly relying on the intuitive idea that a contrapositrve use of justifications is needed to resolve inconsistencies. The idea is first formalized by means of the notion of three‐valued labeling and then through a transformation which explicitly adds all contrapositives of the justifications. An abductive characterization of the JTMS is provided through a further transformation which converts a set of nonmonotonic justifications to a corresponding abduction framework. This approach provides a unifying framework, based on the notion of abduction, for describing both JTMSs and assumption‐based TMSs (ATMSs).

Explaining emotions

Emotions and cognition are inextricably intertwined. Feelings influence thoughts and actions, which in turn can give rise to new emotional reactions. We claim that people infer emotional states in others using commonsense psychological theories of the interactions among emotions, cognition, and action. We present a situation calculus theory of emotion elicitation representing knowledge underlying commonsense causal reasoning involving emotions, and show how the theory can be used to construct explanations for emotional states. The method for constructing explanations is based on the notion of abduction. This method has been implemented in a computer program called AbMaL. The results of computational experiments using AbMaL to construct explanations of examples based on cases taken from a diary study of emotions indicate that the abductive approach to explanatory reasoning about emotions offers significant advantages. We found that the majority of the diary study examples cannot be explained using deduction alone, but they can be explained by making abjuctive inferences. These inferences provide useful information relevant to emotional states.

Peirce's Notion of Abduction

Peirce's Notion of Abduction