Which is the least complex explanation? Abduction and complexity

Publication date 25 August 2020

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05479

Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05) Logics of knowledge and belief (including belief change) (03B42)

Abstract: It may happen that for a certain abductive problem there are several possible explanations, not all of them mutually compatible. What explanation is selected and which criteria are used to select it? This is the well-known problem of the selection of abductive hypotheses. Are there criteria that can help us to select the simplest explanation in a broad spectrum of abductive problems? To give an (affirmative) answer to this question we will move to a field in theoretical computer science: Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). The algorithmic complexity measure K(s) can be used to determine which is the best theory within those explaining a set of observations. We introduce an application of K(s) to the selection of the best abductive explanation, in the context of dynamic epistemic logic (DEL).

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