EXTENDING ABDUCTION FROM PROPOSITIONAL TO 1ST-ORDER LOGIC

Abduction is often considered as inference to the best explanation. In this paper, we appeal to abduction as a way to generate all but only explanations that have ''some reasonable prospect'' of being valid. We first provide a logical definition of abduction. We next study how abductive reasoning can be mechanized in propositional logic. We finally propose the generalization of this study to first-order logic and highlight main obstacles for mechanizing abduction in that frame.