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Contextual Abductive Reasoning with Side-Effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2014

LUÍS MONIZ PEREIRA ,
EMMANUELLE-ANNA DIETZ  and
STEFFEN HÖLLDOBLER
LUÍS MONIZ PEREIRA*
Affiliation:
Centro de Inteligência Artificial (CENTRIA), Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
EMMANUELLE-ANNA DIETZ*
Affiliation:
Centro de Inteligência Artificial (CENTRIA), Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal International Center for Computational Logic, TU Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany
STEFFEN HÖLLDOBLER*
Affiliation:
International Center for Computational Logic, TU Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany
*
*lmp@fct.unl.pt
†dietz@iccl.tu-dresden.de, sh@iccl.tu-dresden.de
†dietz@iccl.tu-dresden.de, sh@iccl.tu-dresden.de
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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.

Keywords

Abductive ReasoningContextual ReasoningSide-effectsHuman ReasoningBelief-BiasInspection PointsThree-valued Łukasiewicz LogicWeak Completion SemanticsLogic Programming
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 14 , Special Issue 4-5: 30th International Conference on Logic Programming , July 2014 , pp. 633 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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