On the Search of Speculations

Abstract

This paper concerns the internal structure of reasoning that, basically consisting in conjecturing and refuting, is too often identified with only deducing, abducing and refuting, that is, with just the deductive search of consequences, hypotheses and refutations. With such identification, it is forgotten that in addition to consequences and hypotheses, there is a third class of conjectures, speculations or proper guesses. Speculations are inferentially non-comparable, or orthogonal, with the premise, and generate creativity. It is presented a very simple formal view for the structure of Commonsense Reasoning, a mathematical model allowing to show the importance of speculations, and specially to start with its systematic computational search.