Research On Abduction From A Logical-Cognitive View

Abduction is a cognitive process that provides an explanation for observed facts.For example,when the ground is wet,it is a good explanation that it has rained the day before.Abduction is widely used in practical fields such as scientific discovery,medical diagnosis,and artificial intelligence.Speech understanding,interpersonal communication,and perceptual processing in daily life are also inseparable from abduction.At the theoretical level,there are two prominent problems in the study of abduction:First,the formalization of abduction is facing dilemma:abduction is a form of reasoning rooted in subjective cognitive experience and the discourse-social context,but formal logicians pursue the abstraction and de-contextualization of human reasoning.It is necessary for us to find a way out for this contradiction.Second,the definition of the meaning of abduction is not clear enough,so that scholars in different fields seem to use the term to refer to different things respectively,such as the process of generating explanation,the process of selecting of the best explanation,the process of seeking and selecting the best explanation,the reasoning process from effect to cause,the process of affirming the consequent based on a certain background,the process of providing cognitive guidance to some individual,and so on.Such a chaotic situation will cause a lot of meaningless debates.Therefore,it is very necessary to return to the source of Perice to clarify the essence of abduction.At the practical level,there is a constant conflict between the probabilistic conclusion of the abduction and the pursuit of precision in practical fields.In order to guide practice,we need to reveal the cognitive nature of abduction and analyze the causes of bias in conclusions of the abduction.Such a research is of a strong practical significance.This research is based on the above two aspects and is committed to breakthroughs in both theory and methodology.Abduction is a non-monotonic logical process with the observed fact as premise and the explanation as conclusion.At the same time,it provides an explanation thus eliminating surprises and promoting understanding,therefore,abduction is obviously a cognitive process too.The two basic attributes of abduction,logical attributes and cognitive attributes,are the core of this study,which provide the rationality of our research on abduction under the framework of informal logic.With the rise of the second generation of cognitive science,studies in logic continue to expand and is presenting a trend of deep integration with cognitive science,which also provides theoretical preparation and methodological possibilities for our research.In the first chapter,we discuss the formation and development of the concept of abduction.First,we introduce the three stages of Pierce's abduction.Subsequently,we introduce two research approaches to the formalization of abduction and informal description of abduction.In the second chapter,we introduce the philosophical origins of abduction,in which we focus on the philosophical ideas of Aristotle and Kant,and their inspiration for Pierce.The third and the forth chapters are the cores of this article.In the third chapter,we detail the cognitive shift in abduction.Specifically,we first introduce the formal dilemma of abduction,and then focus on how we should treat inference and abduction from a cognitive perspective.On base of that,we further propose the mental operation model of abduction.With this model,we answer two major questions:How and where the observed surprising facts come from and how and in what standard the admissibility of the explanatory terms is determined.In the fourth chapter,we discuss in detail the means of forming the explanation.After discussion,we propose that analogy and deductive inference are the two methods of inference for generating explanations.This shows that although abduction is quite intuitive,there are still some determinable logical components in it.In the fifth Chapter,we discuss the differences and connections on reasoning process,concept connotation and cognitive essence between abduction and related concepts,mainly between abduction and induction and between abduction and the inference to the best explanation.In the sixth Chapter,we introduce the practical application of abduction in the fields of scientific discovery,language learning,judicial practice,and diagnosis and treatment.In addition,we clarify in particular that there is no abduction in the field of social norms and mathematics.We summarize the full text in the seventh chapter.We also point out the innovations,limitations and future research prospects of this paper.