stunlaw: Computational Thinking: Some thoughts about Abduction
The recognition of patterns and uncovering their relationships in sets of data was called 'abductive reasoning' by Charles Peirce, who contrasted it with inductive and deductive reasoning. Indeed, Peirce described abduction as a kind of logical inference akin to guessing. This he called the leap of abduction where by one could abduce A from B if A is sufficient (or nearly sufficient) but not necessary for B. The possible uses of this within a computational context should be fairly obvious, especially when software is handling partial, fuzzy or incomplete data and needs to generate future probabilistic decision points, or recognise important features or contours in a data set.
