Andrew Gibson

Frequently people draw on different domains of knowledge to reach a conclusion that seems reasonable despite being difficult to justify from the perspective of a single domain. For example, there appears to be no reason for ethics to involve mathematics, nor is there a mechanism in mathematics to embrace moral questions; however, both ethics and mathematics are likely to be involved in resolving questions about how an autonomous vehicle should make decisions in a social context. In this paper, we present a specialized mode of reasoning, transepistemic abduction (TeA), which establishes how two agents, in order to satisfactorily explain a phenomenon, reason across two epistemic domains despite each agent being ignorant of the other’s domain knowledge. We formalize TeA with epistemic logic and provide a naturalized example that brings together a psychosocial agent and a computational agent for the analysis of subjective text. We find that interaction between agents is critical to the process of TeA and that there are limits to the formalization while remaining true to naturalized reasoning. We conclude with some important implications of these findings for future work in this area.

This chapter presents a holistic foundation for abduction which allows its understanding to be expanded beyond its present conceptual boundaries. The conventional epistemic characterization of abduction is based on subject-object duality and predicated on underlying cognitive representations having a propositional form. We argue that this perspective is too narrow. By drawing on and blending Kitarō Nishida’s logic of Absolute Nothingness and C.S Peirce’s conceptions of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, we expand the notion of abduction to be a foundational process that manifests differently according to different qualities of being, having either an ontological phenomenological character, or an epistemic character, depending on the nature of that way being. It is our hope that this holistic framing of abduction will open up new avenues of investigation into what abduction ultimately is.