ABSTRACT
Abduction is the process of constructing a plausible explanation for a set of observations. It is the fundamental type of reasoning in many complex tasks such as scientific discovery, troubleshooting and diagnosis. Many abductive problems require multicausal explanations in which a conjunction of individual hypotheses together explain the data. In our mental-model theory of multicausal abductive reasoning and skill acquisition, abduction is viewed as the sequential comprehension and integration of data into a single situation model (Johnson & Krems, 1994). Comprehension and integration are accomplished using satisficing search. The model has been implemented in Soar.
