Yeah, that kind of reasoning (abduction) tends to be included with deduction and induction as the third form of reasoning. But IMO, it's really not. It's esse

Yeah, that kind of reasoning (abduction) tends to be included with deduction and induction as the third form of reasoning. But IMO, it's really not. It's essentially confabulation, or legalistic argument -- where you're not attempting to discover an outcome (entailment) but you're trying to convince others that a desired outcome is plausible because it's possible to get there by cherry-picking a line of reasons. If abduction has an Achilles Heel, it's that the sequence of reasons proposed is only ONE OF MANY possible chains of reasons that could have led to the current outcome. That tells you nothing about one possible chain's correctness and little about its likelihood to be correct (since you need to understand the degrees of freedom in each scenario to do that). That makes abduction more useful as a means to express personal bias and manipulate the beliefs of others than an attempt to fair-mindedly understand how something came to be. It's hardly surprising that LLMs employ abduction rather than deduction or induction. Abduction is really just storytelling, where you recount a similar tale that resembles the current scenario (and ends where you want it to). It doesn't require any ability to generalize similar events into precise logical rules based on instances that share the same dependencies, mechanism of action, and outcome. Only by creating such rules using induction can deductive reasoning then take place using them. But LLMs associate, they don't equate. To date, I see no path to that changing.