Atocha Aliseda-Llera

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México | UNAM · Institute of Philosophical Research

We propose a logic of abduction that (i) provides an appropriate formalization of the explanatory conditional, and that (ii) captures the defeasible nature of abductive inference. For (i), we argue that explanatory conditionals are non-classical, and rely on Brian Chellas’s work on conditional logics for providing an alternative formalization of th...

In this text, I put forward the thesis that creativity and logic do not exclude each other. I depart from the characterization of a creative product as that which is novel and useful. I presuppose there is some kind of method for generating that new product, and in this respect, I rely on Peirce’s formulation of abduction. A central point to be dis...

In this chapter, the focus will be on formal models of hypothetical reasoning , in particular on those concerned with abductive reasoning. In Sect. 10.1 , the chapter offers a brief history of the notion of abduction, starting with an attempt to distinguish it from its closest neighbor, induction. Charles Peirce’s original conception of abduction i...

This Special issue of La Nuova Critica contains papers based on the presentations given in the two-day workshop Scientific Models and a Comprehensive Picture of Reality, arranged by the Finnish Society for natural philosophy together with the physics Foundations Society on May 21-22, 2016 in Helsinki. The workshop called for philosophers, physicist...

In this paper we analyze the thesis according to which belief is a habit of conduct, one purely of thought or leading to action, basing our analysis on the notion of abduction interpreted as an epistemic process for belief revision, all of this within the frame of Charles Peirce’s Pragmatism. The notion of abduction in his work is entangled with ma...

The motivation for this paper comes out of our experience with teaching natural deduction (ND) and with the way this formal system is implemented by the \textsc{Coq} proof assistant, namely by means of so-called tactics, which are heuristics that transform a goal formula into a sequence of subgoals whose provability implies that of the original for...

In this article we introduce an adaptive logic: latar, which together with a contraction procedure retro and a way to distinguish kinds of premises (knowledge, hypotheses, observations), serves as a formal setting for hypotheses generation and testing in the empirical sciences, in our case medicine, more in particular, medical diagnosis en neurolog...

From an informational point of view, an inference or argumentation can be considered as a finite sequence of sentences of a language, not arbitrarily ordered, for which one may distinguish an initial group of sentences called premises, followed by another sentence called conclusion. The set of premises (or set of reasons) may be empty, but the conc...

This book critically re-examines Otto Neurath conception of the unity of science. Some of the leading scholars of Neurath work, along with many preeminent philosophers of science critically examine his place in the history of philosophy of science and evaluate the relevance of his work for contemporary debates concerning the unity of science

The formalization of abductive reasoning has received increasing attention from lo-gicians. However, few work is found beyond abduction in propositional logic, given that in a first order formalism, the undecidability problem naturally appears, and therefore an abductive problem cannot even be appropriately formulated. Still, many applications in a...

How do doctors think when they ought to solve the enigma: what is my patient suffering from? Such is the question behind this article. Our analysis rests on real life situations, where medical residents discuss specific cases in neurology, aiming at a joint diagnosis. Our theoretical thesis claims that the diagnostic process has a rational componen...

This chapter focuses on the logical, historical and computational approaches to the philosophy of science. It discusses how the logical approach to philosophy of science was introduced by the Vienna Circle, and developed by them and their followers and associates. The logical approach to philosophy of science remained the dominant subject throughou...

The motivation behind the collection of papers presented in this THEORIA forum on Abductive reasoning is my book Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into the Processes of Discovery and Explanation. These contributions raise fundamental questions. One of them concerns the conjectural character of abduction. The choice of a logical framework...

El objetivo de este artículo es dar cuenta de las ciencias cognitivas en cuanto al problema de la representación del conocimiento, lo cual toca naturalmente a la filosofía y a la concepción de la mente como una computadora. Por otro lado, se hace un análisis del descubrimiento científico a partir de la filosofía, las ciencias cognitivas así como el...

The motivation behind the collection of papers presented in this THEORIA forum on abductive reasoning is my book “Abductive reasoning. Logical investigations into discovery and explanation” [Synthese Library 330. Dordrecht: Springer (2006; Zbl 1107.03300)]. These contributions raise fundamental questions. One of them concerns the conjectural charac...

Abductive problems have been widely studied in propositional logic. First order abduction, however, has been viewed as intractable, for the undecidability of logical consequence. In this paper, we propose a notion of abductive problem, N-abductive problem, which is relative to the cardinality of the minimal model satisfying the given theory. We use...

This papers presents δ-resolution, a dual resolution calculus. It is based on standard resolution, and used appropriate formulae equivalent to disjunctive normal forms, instead of conjunctive normal ones, as it is the case for resolution. This duality is then useful to create a calculus for abductive process, as a way to construct a set of abductiv...

Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation is a much awaited original contribution to the study of abductive reasoning, providing logical foundations and a rich sample of pertinent applications. Divided into three parts on the conceptual framework, the logical foundations, and the applications, this monograph takes t...

In this paper I address the question of the dynamics of empirical progress, both in theory evaluation and in theory improvement. I meet the challenge laid down by Theo Kuipers in Kuipers (1999), namely to operationalize the task of "instrumentalist abduction," that is, theory revision aiming at empirical progress. I offer a reformulation of Kuipers...

In this paper I argue for a place for logic inscientific methodology, at the same level asthat of computational and historicalapproaches. While it is well known that a awhole generation of philosophers dismissedLogical Positivism (not just for the logicthough), there are at least two reasons toreconsider logical approaches in the philosophyof scien...

Summer 2001 marked the tenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. A decade of contests and exhibitions have inspired innovation and research in AI robotics. Here we look back at the origins of the contest and how it evolved. We also reflect ...

Charles S. Peirce’s abductive formulation ((Peirce, 1958, 5.189), reproduced on p.7), has been the point of departure of many recent studies on abductive reasoning in artificial intelligence, such as in logic programming (Kakas et al.,1992), knowledge acquisition (Kakas and Mancarella, 1994) and natural language processing (Hobbs et al.,1990).

175 Bibliography 177 viii Acknowledgements It is a privilege to have five professors on my reading committee representing the different areas of my Ph.D. program in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems: Computer Science, Linguistics, Logic, Philosophy, and Psychology. Tom Wasow was the first person to point me in the direction of abduction. He gave me u...

Some researches state that discovering what to say is part of the writing process. We are interested in studying this aspect of writing within the scope of computer models. MEXICA is a computer model for plot generation which, inspired by the idea of the discovering aspect of writing, avoids the use of predefined story-structures and explicit chara...

In this talk I shall present a proposal for the use of logic to teach heuristic reasoning in the Philosophy of Science master program at UNAM in Mexico. In particular, I make use of an extension of the semantic tableaux framework (Aliseda 1997, 1998) to introduce students to the notions of confirmation and falsification, as well as for presenting t...

In this paper, I treat the subject concerned with the theory of Suppositio in the Mexican golden age, as exposed by Alonso de la Veracruz [Ver82, ReBe85] and Tomás de Mercado [ReBe85]. According to this tradition, supposition is a property of terms occurring in propositions and are such that are verifiable of what they signify. On the one hand, the...