Abstract
Reasoning can be defined as the process of applying existing
knowledge in order to produce new knowledge. In logic, there are at least two
fundamentally different sorts of reasoning: the deductive and the abductive.
Deductive reasoning (or simply deduction) is the process of deriving
consequences from what is known or assumed to be true. On the other
hand, abductive reasoning (or simply abduction) infers what needs to be assumed
to derive a given consequence. Thus, deduction
and abduction differ in the direction in which a rule has been used
for inference.
In this work, we present a calculus to generate abductive
explanations for propositional theories. The formalism is based on
propositional resolution with Set-Of-Support strategy. Furthermore,
we investigate an extension of this calculus dealing with orderings.
