Two kinds of abduction
Selective abduction picks the best explanation from a fixed list of candidates. Creative abduction proposes a new explanation that was not on the list to begin with — typically by positing a latent variable. Both are core to senior expert reasoning. Both can be made explicit in a causal model.
Pages in this cluster
Selective Abductive Reasoning → Diagnosis finds the most probable cause. Abduction finds the best complete explanation.
When a known cause almost fits but not quite — when several anomalies arrive simultaneously and no single hypothesis accounts for all of them — diagnosis reaches its limit. Abduction is the reasoning mode that generates explanations, not just selects among them. It is how experts think when they encounter something genuinely new.
Creative Abduction → What Your Senior Experts Are Actually Doing
The thirty-year expert glances at a chart the analyst assembled and says, plainly, that the three patterns are driven by the same unnamed thing. Everyone in the room has seen this moment. It is not intuition in the vague sense, and it is not a slower version of what a structure-learning algorithm does. It is a specific inference called creative abduction, and its formal structure is a Bayesian network with a latent common cause.
Why these matter
Most enterprise tooling captures the procedural surface of expert work — the SOPs, the checklists, the dashboards. The reasoning underneath is what these pages address.