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Theory formation by abduction : a case study based on the chemical revolution
Abduction is the process of constructing explanations. This chapter suggests that automated abduction is a key to advancing beyond the "routine theory revision" methods developed in early AI research towards automated reasoning systems capable of "world model revision" - dramatic changes in systems of beliefs such as occur in children's cognitive development and in scientific revolutions. The chapter describes a general approach to automating theory revision based upon computational methods for theory formation by abduction. The approach is based on the idea that, when an anomaly is encountered, the best course is often simply to suppress parts of the original theory thrown into question by the contradiction and to derive an explanation of the anomalous observation based on relatively solid, basic principles. This process of looking for explanations of unexpected new phenomena can lead by abductive inference to new hypotheses that can form crucial parts of a revised theory. As an illustration, the chapter shows how some of Lavoisier's key insights during the Chemical Revolution can be viewed as examples of theory formation by abduction
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Theory formation by abduction : initial results of a case study based on the chemical revolution
Abduction is the process of constructing explanations. This chapter suggests that automated abduction is a key to advancing beyond the "routine theory revision" methods developed in early AI research towards automated reasoning systems capable of "world model revision" β dramatic changes in systems of beliefs such as occur in children's cognitive development and in scientific revolutions. The chapter describes a general approach to automating theory revision based upon computational methods for theory formation by abduction. The approach is based on the idea that, when an anomaly is encountered, the best course is often simply to suppress parts of the original theory thrown into question by the contradiction and to derive an explanation of the anomalous observation based on relatively solid, basic principles. This process of looking for explanations of unexpected new phenomena can lead by abductive inference to new hypotheses that can form crucial parts of a revised theory. As an illustration, the chapter shows how some of Lavoisier's key insights during the Chemical Revolution can be viewed as examples of theory formation by abduction
An introduction to DSmT
The management and combination of uncertain, imprecise, fuzzy and even
paradoxical or high conflicting sources of information has always been, and
still remains today, of primal importance for the development of reliable
modern information systems involving artificial reasoning. In this
introduction, we present a survey of our recent theory of plausible and
paradoxical reasoning, known as Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT), developed for
dealing with imprecise, uncertain and conflicting sources of information. We
focus our presentation on the foundations of DSmT and on its most important
rules of combination, rather than on browsing specific applications of DSmT
available in literature. Several simple examples are given throughout this
presentation to show the efficiency and the generality of this new approach
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