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Dear Colleague We are sending you the following announcement of a new book
publication as we have been given your address by Professor Lorenzo Magnani and
honestly believe you to be interested in this subject matter. If you are not interested in this
publication, simply delete this email. Apologies if you receive this notice
more than once. Thank you for your
attention. Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers London Abduction,
Reason, and Science Processes of
Discovery and Explanation by Lorenzo Magnani
University of Pavia,
Pavia, Italy and
Georgia Institute of
Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
0-306-46514-0/March 2001/224pp Euro 88.50/ USD 85/ GBP 58.75 More than a hundred years
ago, the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term
"abduction" to refer to inference that involves the generation and
evaluation of explanatory hypotheses. The study of abductive inference was slow
to develop, as logicians concentrated on deductive logic and on inductive logic
based on formal calculi such as probability theory. In recent decades, however,
there has been renewed interest in abductive inference, from two primary
sources. Philosophers of science have recognized the importance of abduction in
the discovery and evaluation of scientific theories, and researchers in
artificial intelligence have realized that abduction is a key part of medical
diagnosis and other tasks that require finding explanations. Psychologists have
been slow to adopt the terms "abduction" and "abductive inference",
but have been showing increasing concerns with causal and explanatory reasoning Thus abduction is now a key
topic of research in cognitive science, the interdisciplinary study of mind and
intelligence. This new book Abduction,
Reason, and Science contributes to this research in several
interesting ways. First, it ties together the concerns of philosophers of
science and AI researchers, showing, for example, the connections between
scientific thinking and medical expert systems. Second, it lays out a useful
general framework for discussion of a variety of kinds of abduction. Third, it
develops important ideas about aspects of abductive reasoning that have been
relatively neglected in cognitive science, including the use of visual and
temporal representations and the role of abduction in the withdrawal of
hypotheses. The author has provided a valuable contribution to the renaissance
of research on explanatory reasoning. Contents
Hypothesis Generation ● Theoretical
Abduction ● Manipulative Abduction ● Diagnostic Reasoning ● Visual and Temporal
Abduction ● Governing Inconsistencies ● Hypothesis Withdrawal in Science ● To Order this Book please
contact:
Kluwer Academic Publishers Order Department P.O. Box 322 3300 AH Dordrecht The Netherlands (: +31 78 6392 392 Fax: +31 78 6546 474 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Customer service dept: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or for customers in
USA, Canada, Mexico and Latin America: Kluwer Academic Publishers Order Department P.O. Box 358 Accord Station Hingham, MA 02018-0358, U.S.A. (: +1 781 871 6600 Fax: +1 781 871 6528 Customer service dept: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
