Abstract
This chapter primarily deals with the conceptual prospects for generalizing the aim of abduction from the standard one of explaining surprising or anomalous observations to that of empirical progress or even truth approximation. It turns out that the main abduction task then becomes the instrumentalist task of theory revision aiming at an empirically more successful theory, relative to the available data, but not necessarily compatible with them. The rest, that is, genuine empirical progress as well as observational, referential and theoretical truth approximation, is a matter of evaluation and selection, and possibly new generation tasks for further improvement. The chapter concludes with a survey of possible points of departure, in AI and logic, for computational treatment of the instrumentalist task guided by the ‘comparative evaluation matrix’.
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Notes
- 1.
It is plausible to add a fourth subtask, essentially alongside 2: search for a revision Y of X such that Y is closer to ‘the structural truth’ than X. However, so far we have not succeeded in making sense of this notion of truth, let alone of ‘closer to structural truth’.
- 2.
Note the return to the general symbolization in this section, where X may indicate an inclusion, an exclusion or a two-sided theory .
- 3.
- 4.
See Sect. 4.4.2.
- 5.
For a general survey of computational philosophy of science, see Chap. 11 of Kuipers (2000). It includes also an impression of Paul Thagard’s later quasi-connectionist approach to theory selection with the program ECHO (Thagard 1992). For a constructive critical evaluation, see also Vreeswijk (2005).
- 6.
- 7.
Meheus (2005), presents a more ambitious approach than Aliseda (below): “search the maximally successful hypotheses from the set of background assumptions ant the set of observational statements”.
- 8.
- 9.
See Chap. 9 for the way in which aesthetic considerations may be functional for empirical progress and truth approximation.
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Revised version of: "Abduction aiming at empirical progress or even at truth approximation, leading to challenge for computational modelling ", Scientific Discovery and Creativity, eds. J. Meheus , T. Nickles, special issue of Foundations of Science. Vol. 4.3, 1999, 307–23. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Atocha Aliseda , Johan van Benthem , Alexander van den Bosch , Hidde de Jong and the editors for their helpful and interesting comments.
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Kuipers, T.A.F. (2019). Abduction Aiming at Empirical Progress or Even Truth Approximation: A Challenge for Computational Modelling. In: Nomic Truth Approximation Revisited. Synthese Library, vol 399. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98388-2_10
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