META-LEVEL ABDUCTION

Meta-level abduction (MLA) has been proposed as a method to abduce missing laws in completing proofs and explaining observations at the meta-level. Based on a simple logic of causality, Inoue et al. (2010) firstly proposed meta-level abduction to discover physically unobserved causality in terms of hidden rules to explain given empirical rules with respect to skills for music playing. Meta-level abduction has also been applied to completion of biological networks containing both positive and negative causal effects (Inoue et al., 2013). In this paper, we define a general framework for meta-level abduction together with a logical system for it, and analyze its potential power in various patterns of abductive reasoning. We will see that meta-level abduction can realize second-order existential abduction by Schurz (2008). Moreover, meta-level abduction can be coordinated with selective, creative and other types of abductions.