Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Abduction is the process of constructing explanations. This paper suggests that abduction is to "world model revisions" — dramatic changes in systems of beliefs such as occur in children's cognitive development and in scientific revolutions. The paper describes a model of belief revision based upon hypothesis formation by abduction. When a contradiction between an observation and an existing model or theory about the physical world is encountered, the best course is often simply to suppress parts of the original theory thrown into question by the contradiction and to derive an explanation of the anomalous observation based on relatively solid, basic principles. This process of looking for explanations of unexpected new phenomena can lead by abductive inference to new hypotheses that can form crucial parts of a revised theory. As an illustration, the paper shows how one of Lavoisier's key insights during the Chemical Revolution can be viewed as an example of hypothesis formation by abduction.