Talk:Abductive reasoning

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Abductive reasoning article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2Auto-archiving period: 3 months

This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Philosophy: Logic / Science Mid‑importance Philosophy portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philosophy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of content related to philosophy on Wikipedia. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the general discussion about philosophy content on Wikipedia. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Associated task forces: /  Logic Philosophy of science Statistics Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Statistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of statistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

Archives

Archive 1 Archive 2

This page has archives. Topics inactive for 90 days are automatically archived 1 or more at a time by Lowercase sigmabot III if there are more than 3.

Reference for Set-cover abduction formalization section

There is a section in the article on the formalization of set-cover abduction. However, there is no reference provided for this. I am searching for the original paper that first proposed the set-cover formalization described in that section. Does anyone know what that paper is? Cerebrality (talk) 05:05, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We should remove Mastermind, but what to replace it with?

Mastermind is used in this article as a paradigmatic example of abductive reasoning. It seems to me that this is erroneous.

The Mastermind provides information that necessarily closes off parts of the solution space. The player literally deducts solutions from that space. At any given stage, it's not possible to assign relative likelihoods of different possible solutions. There is only enough information to deduce which solutions are possible and which are not, never any information that would permit the player to pick one possible explanation as being best among all those possible. I am no logician, but the article says, "Abduction is then the process that picks out some member of E," and Mastermind just doesn't work that way. Meanwhile, the idea of using a game to illustrate inference to the best explanation was a very good one. Pictures can make the article more engaging, and it would be great to use a paradigmatic example. A game would do very well in this role, but Mastermind does not meet the brief. Are there other games that would do?

Let's brainstorm what kinds of pictures we could use.

Games:

• Sort of pictorial mystery game, something along the lines of, what's happening in this picture?
• Many strategy games ask each player to make some guess about the opponent's strategy, e.g. Stratego.

Non-game examples might be taken from the history of science or criminal investigations.

In any case, unless I'm mistaken and Mastermind is abductive, it cannot remain in the article. So, whether or not I/we find a better picture, I'll remove it. I'll wait a few weeks to provide an opportunity for alternative views to be heard. Flies 1 (talk) 19:59, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that mastermind may not the best example. However, it formally fits into the explanation of Abductive_reasoning#Logic-based_abduction, with O the observed b/w summaries, T the rules of how to compute a summary in general, and E a set of secret color combinations that would explain O. The simplicity requirement could e.g. include to accept only a singleton set for E. Prior probabilities could be discrete uniform distribution; or, less trivial, take into account some known color preference of the oppenent who chose the secret colors (e.g. it might be known that he likes green, so the bottommost guess in the picture would have a lower prior probability than the one above it). I'd oppose your opinion that mastermind uses deduction: in mastermind, E is not a logical consequence of O, but, vice versa, O is a consequence of E and T, which perfectly matches the 3rd formula line in Abductive_reasoning#Logic-based_abduction (${\displaystyle T\cup E\models O}$).

Before adding the mastermind picture, I, too, thought about real-life examples (like yours: scientific experiments, criminology). However, coming up with a formalized theory T is difficult in criminology, while no plausible prior probabilities can be assigned to physics theories (for example, to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Einstein considered a first version of his relativity theory - what whould be the numerical value of its prior probability?). In a game, usually all aspects are formalized, and the reader can compare our explanations of T, O, and E to the game description. I'm aware of 2 games about criminology, viz. Scotland Yard (board game) and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (gamebook), but didn't think in detail about how to use them as an example here (Sherlock Holmes isn't sufficiently formalized, I guess). In your examples, what would be the prior probabilities in Stratego, or/and what would be the background theory T in a pictorial mystery game? - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 11:27, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Need for better example

Most people are like me and have no idea how a game of billiard works. I actually never saw one. Please have someone introduce understandable examples. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.2.179.92 (talk) 12:23, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done. I used one of my own devising. I hope people like it. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 17:09, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]