A Formal Definition of Abduction-Methods using Cards

Abstract

Abduction is one of the human thinking processes that create new concepts. Because we usually do thinking without any selfconciousness about the progress of processes, the abduction is very much spontaneous and we do not feel such that it proceeds efficiently. Therefore if it is possible to organize the processes in a well-selected way, the efficiency of abduction would be very much improved. We call as an abduction-method the selected way for which a precise description, namely framework, is given. We turn our attention to one of abduction-methods using cards that are slips of paper on which an idea is respectively described. For example, if we want to do abduction using KJ method, which is one of the most famous abduction-method using cards in Japan, we must follow the framework by which we draw a graph only after we have completed grouping the cards. In this paper, we give a formalized description of frameworks, as the combination of works. These works are the formalization for a set of data and the way to view the data, and the manipulation for them. Each work is defined in the ordinary style of set notations. This formalism supplies another way observing the province of abduction-methods. Using this way, we become to be able to capture clearly the domain covered by abduction-methods, to find easily the differences of the various frameworks, and to observe abstractly the data which an abduction-methed holds at each stage applying the method.