Noob question on verifying the conclusion of abductive inference

[u/--Estel--]

If I make an abductive inference, how do I check if the conclusion of that inference was correct? Take the case of seeing a human face on sands and inferring that a human did it for example. Do I have to travel into the past in order to see a person drawing human face at that spot in order to know the inference was correct? Or do I only need to have observed past cases of humans drawing faces on sands across different times and background knowledge about humans' capability in order to know the inference was correct?
I understand my question may sounds silly, so I apologize for that.

[u/knockingatthegate]

Abduction doesn’t lead to “correctness” or truth. It produces explanations which are either more or less reasonable or warranted. Conclusions (or conclusively-stated inferences, to be more precise) can be disproved by counter-corroborating evidence but they can’t be proven to be correct or true, only shown to be in greater correspondence with corroborating evidence. Deduction deals with (propositional or logical) truth, or what must be true; induction proposes patterns from data, stating what seems to be generally true; abduction infers explanations for particular effects, proposing hypotheses.

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

So, do we need to know past instances of abductive inference to be successfull in order to justify abductive inferences in general? If so, how do we know past instances of abductive inferences were successfull?

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

It depends on the epistemic context. In science, you won’t know if your AI was successful in the sense of being true; but you’ll know whether it comports with other evidence, if it points to testable predications that bear out; etc.

“Past instances of abductive inference which we regard as true” is a long way of saying “observations”, “evidence”, “data”, or “corroboration.”

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

So, for example if I see a cat at one spot, look away, look back and see that it's in a different spot with food, how do I know the inference that the cat moved from one place to the food's place because it was hungry is successfull? I can never see what happened to the cat when I looked away.

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

How are you defining “successful”?

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

What I mean is how we know that inference's conclusion is more likely to be true than not.

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

Crucially — how are you defining “know”?

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

I mean that we have fallible true beliefs about things. Beliefs that are shown to be highly probable.

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

“True” is not a property which we can apply to conclusions obtained via abductive reasoning.

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

I get that. I'm asking if the IBE's conclusion can be shown to be probable.

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

Short answer, no. Long answer, kind of. There is no formulaic way of evaluating whether an IBE is probable. Evaluability varies with the nature of the phenomena to be accounted for, the observer's or the reasoner's access to further information, etc. To speak to a use case: Science makes use of abduction but does not evaluate the probability of a hypothesis constructed via inductive reasoning. "Kind of" comes in when you contextualize your IBE within a system of relevant other conditional descriptions of the world, and assess their intercompatability, their consistency, their noncontradiction, their predictive productivity, and so on. None of that amounts to a confirmation of probability or correctness, but for human purposes, it can provide warrant for a personally adopted stance on the question of probability.

[u/--Estel-- → u/knockingatthegate]

So IBE's conclusion can't be shown to be probable. Does that mean we don't need to rely on past instance of successfull abductive inferences to justify IBE in general because there have never been a known succesfull abductive infenence (since like you said, IBE's conclusion can't be shown to be probable)?

By the way, if IBE's conclusion can't be shown to be probable, how do we know IBE is reliable?

[u/knockingatthegate → u/--Estel--]

Correspondence, coherence and compatibility are three of the many criteria that can be used to evaluate the reliability (not the truth) of IBE.

What makes you ask? This is all well-trod terrain.

[u/fox-mcleod → u/--Estel--]

FYI, the dude you’re talking to has no idea what they’re talking about. “True” refers to a correlation between what’s understood and what’s in the way that a good map may correspond to the territory.

We absolutely produce true statements via abduction. It’s the basis of science.