abduction

ab·duct   (āb-dŭkt')    tr.v.   ab·duct·ed, ab·duct·ing, ab·ducts To carry off by force; kidnap. Physiology To draw away from the midline of the body or from an adjacent part or limb. [Latin abdūcere, abduct- : ab-, away; see ab-1 + dūcere, to lead; see deuk- in Indo-European roots.] ab·duct·ee' n., ab·duc'tion n.

Main Entry: ab·duc·tion
Pronunciation: ab-'d&k-sh&n, &b-
Function: noun
1 a : the action of abducting <abduction of a robbery victim> b : the tort or felony of abducting a person
2 : the unlawful carrying away of a wife or female child or ward for the purpose of marriage or sexual intercourse
NOTE: Sense 2 has its roots in common law. As statutorily defined, mainly in the nineteenth century, abduction is generally stated to include taking away or detention of a woman under a certain age, usually 16 or 18, with or without her consent or knowledge of her age.

abduction logic
The process of inference to the best explanation.
"Abduction" is sometimes used to mean just the generation of hypotheses to explain observations or conclusionsm, but the former definition is more common both in philosophy and computing.
The semantics and the implementation of abduction cannot be reduced to those for deduction, as explanation cannot be reduced to implication.
Applications include fault diagnosis, plan formation and default reasoning.
Negation as failure in logic programming can both be given an abductive interpretation and also can be used to implement abduction. The abductive semantics of negation as failure leads naturally to an argumentation-theoretic interpretation of default reasoning in general.
[Better explanation? Example?]
["Abductive Inference", John R. Josephson ].
(2000-12-07)