a nice post, including:
>The process of taking
>a set of universal laws like A, A', etc, and a single observation like C,
>and creating a hyothesis like B or B' has been dubbed "abduction", with
>the root "abduce", by the AI people.
Just to be fair, the logic of abduction (or `retroduction') is not a recent
development by AI theorists. It was discussed extensively by Charles
Sanders Peirce (pron. `purse'), the great American pragmatist and
semiologist, at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries.
Damien Broderick