Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation is a much awaited original contribution to the study of abductive reasoning, providing logical foundations and a rich sample of pertinent applications. Divided into three parts on the conceptual framework, the logical foundations, and the applications, this monograph takes the reader for a comprehensive and erudite tour through the taxonomy of abductive reasoning, via the logical workings of abductive inference ending with applications pertinent to scientific explanation, empirical progress, pragmatism and belief revision.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Workshop Machine Learning, Meta-Reasoning and Logics held in Hotel de Mar in Sesimbra, Portugal, 15-17 February 1988. All the papers were edited afterwards. The Workshop encompassed several fields of Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Belief Revision, Meta-Reasoning and Logics. The objective of this Workshop was not only to address the common issues in these areas, but also to examine how to elaborate cognitive architectures for systems capable of learning from experience, revising their beliefs and reasoning about what they know. Acknowledgements The editing of this book has been supported by COST-13 Project Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition funded by the Commission o/the European Communities which has covered a substantial part of the costs. Other sponsors who have supported this work were Junta Nacional de lnvestiga~ao Cientlfica (JNICT), lnstituto Nacional de lnvestiga~ao Cientlfica (INIC), Funda~ao Calouste Gulbenkian. I wish to express my gratitude to all these institutions. Finally my special thanks to Paula Pereira and AnaN ogueira for their help in preparing this volume. This work included retyping all the texts and preparing the camera-ready copy. Introduction 1 1. Meta-Reasoning and Machine Learning The first chapter is concerned with the role meta-reasoning plays in intelligent systems capable of learning. As we can see from the papers that appear in this chapter, there are basically two different schools of thought.

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