abduction : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

English Dictionary: abduction	by the DICT Development Group
3 results for abduction
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
abduction n the criminal act of capturing and carrying away by force a family member; if a man's wife is abducted it is a crime against the family relationship and against the wife (physiology) moving of a body part away from the central axis of the body
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Abduction \Abduc"tion\, n. [L. abductio: cf. F. abduction.] 1. The act of abducing or abducting; a drawing apart; a carrying away. --Roget. 2. (Physiol.) The movement which separates a limb or other part from the axis, or middle line, of the body. 3. (Law) The wrongful, and usually the forcible, carrying off of a human being; as, the abduction* of a child, the abduction of an heiress. 4. (Logic) A syllogism or form of argument in which the major is evident, but the minor is only probable.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
abduction The process of {inference} to the best explanation. "Abduction" is sometimes used to mean just the generation of hypotheses to explain observations or conclusionsm, but the former definition is more common both in philosophy and computing. The {semantics} and the implementation of abduction cannot be reduced to those for {deduction}, as explanation cannot be reduced to implication. Applications include fault diagnosis, plan formation and {default reasoning}. {Negation as failure} in {logic programming} can both be given an abductive interpretation and also can be used to implement abduction. The abductive semantics of negation as failure leads naturally to an {argumentation}-theoretic interpretation of default reasoning in general. [Better explanation? Example?] ["Abductive Inference", John R. Josephson ]. (2000-12-07)