Contextual abductive reasoning with side-effects

DOI10.1017/S1471068414000258zbMATH Open1309.68176arXiv1405.3713MaRDI QIDQ2931270FDOQ2931270

Authors: Luís Moniz Pereira, Emmanuelle-Anna Dietz, Steffen Hölldobler 

Publication date: 25 November 2014

Published in: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The belief bias effect is a phenomenon which occurs when we think that we judge an argument based on our reasoning, but are actually influenced by our beliefs and prior knowledge. Evans, Barston and Pollard carried out a psychological syllogistic reasoning task to prove this effect. Participants were asked whether they would accept or reject a given syllogism. We discuss one specific case which is commonly assumed to be believable but which is actually not logically valid. By introducing abnormalities, abduction and background knowledge, we adequately model this case under the weak completion semantics. Our formalization reveals new questions about possible extensions in abductive reasoning. For instance, observations and their explanations might include some relevant prior abductive contextual information concerning some side-effect or leading to a contestable or refutable side-effect. A weaker notion indicates the support of some relevant consequences by a prior abductive context. Yet another definition describes jointly supported relevant consequences, which captures the idea of two observations containing mutually supportive side-effects. Though motivated with and exemplified by the running psychology application, the various new general abductive context definitions are introduced here and given a declarative semantics for the first time, and have a much wider scope of application. Inspection points, a concept introduced by Pereira and Pinto, allows us to express these definitions syntactically and intertwine them into an operational semantics.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3713

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zbMATH Keywords

logic programminghuman reasoningabductive reasoningside-effectscontextual reasoningweak completion semanticsbelief-biasinspection pointsthree-valued Łukasiewicz logic

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Logic programming (68N17) Logic in artificial intelligence (68T27)

Cites Work

• The well-founded semantics for general logic programs
• Contributions to the Theory of Logic Programming
• Logic programming, knowledge representation, and nonmonotonic reasoning. Essays dedicated to Michael Gelfond on the occasion of his 65th birthday
• On the Relationship Between Abduction and Deduction
• Computational logic and human thinking. How to be artificially intelligent

Cited In (2)

• Naturalizing logic
• Context-dependent abduction and relevance

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