Cognitively Plausible Heuristics to Tackle the Computational Complexity of Abductive Reasoning

The work described in my Ph.D. dissertation (Fischer 1991) It is the outcome of seven years of research focusing on abductive explanation generation and involving the departments of computer and information science, industrial and systems engineering, pathology, and allied medical professions at The Ohio State University. In the first phase of my work, I characterized abductive problem solving and performed a comparative analysis of two abductive problem solvers (Smith and Fischer 1990). Thus, I implemented two cognitively plausible heuristics to tackle the complexity of abductive reasoning and successfully experimented with them. This work, originally applied to the domain of alloantibody identification, was generalized to domain-independent abductive problem solving. Abduction, that is, inference to a hypothesis that best explains a set of data, appears to be ubiquitous in cognition.