abstract:

Schurz (2008) proposed a justification of creative abduction on the basis of the Reichenbachian principle of the common cause. In this talk we take up the idea of combining creative abduction with causal principles and model instances of successful creative abduction within a Bayes net framework. We identify necessary conditions for such inferences and investigate their unificatory power. We also sketch several interesting applications of modelling creative abduction Bayesian style. In particular, we discuss use-novel predictions, confirmation, and the problem of underdetermination in the context of abductive inferences.

speaker:

Research fellow at the Duesseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (DCLPS); PhD on meta-induction and social opinion pooling; publications in Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie (2018), European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2019), Logique et Analyse (2017), Philosophia (2017), Synthese (2018).