Searching for the unity of science
from classical logic to abductive logical systems
pp. 201-212
in: John Symons, Olga Pombo, Juan M. Torres (eds), Otto Neurath and the unity of science, Berlin, Springer, 2011Abstract
From an informational point of view, an inference or argumentation can be considered as a finite sequence of sentences of a language, not arbitrarily ordered, for which one may distinguish an initial group of sentences called premises, followed by another sentence called conclusion. The set of premises (or set of reasons) may be empty, but the conclusion has to be present.