The Referential Basis of Abduction and Logic

AI has often mistreated logic and abduction. A closer view at the historical roots of logic and at the system theoretic structure of logical modeling reveals that the foundations of logic lie in a science of argumentation rather than reasoning. The basis of such a science is a clarifcation of the term "argument" that also leads to a reduction of the semantics of natural language. In logic, the reductions are tacit semantic restrictions to specialized meanings of terms and forms of conceptual relations as they are used in arguments. These relations are the conditions of the possibility of conceptual reference and at the same time of logical reasoning, where abduction and the identification of something as something form the basis of both. 1 Introduction The continuing argument concerning the nature of abductive reasoning in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is symptomatic for the poor understanding of the philosophical basis of logic that prevails in AI. Many, though not all, AI researchers..