Abductive Reasoning: Philosophical and Educational Perspectives in Medicine

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to emphasize the significance of abduction in order to illustrate the problem solving process and to propose a unified epistemological model of medical reasoning. The paper introduces an epistemological model (Select and Test Model) of medical reasoning (diagnosis, therapy, monitoring) which can be described in terms of abduction (selective), deduction, and induction (Sect. 2). This model first describes the different roles played by these basic inference types in developing the various kinds of medical reasoning (Sect. 3), then is connected with cognitive models of medical reasoning (Sect. 4), and finally provides an abstract representation—an epistemological architecture (STMODEL)—of the control knowledge embedded in a medical Knowledge-Based System (KBS) (Sects. 3 and 5). Moreover, four meanings of the word abduction (creative, selective, automatic, to the best explanation) are discussed in order to clarify their significance in epistemology, psychological experimental research, and AI. In my opinion the controversial status of abduction is related to a confusion between the epistemological and cognitive levels, and to a lack of explanation as to why people sometimes deviate from normative epistemological principles.