We need to bring back abductive/retroductive inference (to the best explanation) as if it were its own mode of reasoning to complement deduction and induction.

We need to bring back abductive/retroductive inference (to the best explanation) as if it were its own mode of reasoning to complement deduction and induction. This is how scientific discoveries are often made IMHO but often chalked up to some kind of intuition. There is actually a logical structure even though is is hard to formalize and prove. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning I am working on dialog management stuff as an engineer who sits between data scientists, NLP, and product people. It is understandable that trained stats people see everything as a stats problem (induction), but we forgot about GOFAI & symbolic AI (deductive) systems along the way. Philosophy has actually been ahead of the curve on this one for over 140 years. Maybe the "3rd wave" of AI will be to synthesize. https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AIFull.pdf https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AIFull.pdf I personally have not had a chance to read Norvig or dive into LISP or Prolog much, but am using CLIPS expert system in a project and have toyed with core.logic in Clojure back in the day. Lots of opportunity to resurrect some of these older methods that may be superior to imperative/bespoke code given modern hardware and infrastructure.