Revisiting the role of abductive inference in fusion domain

Abductive inference plays a very important role in the fusion domain, seen as a “conceptual framework” driving the conjecturing and hypothesizing process mainly aimed to discover relationships. Unfortunately, despite the recent gained attention in several fields as philosophy of science and logic, and the ongoing debate, in the fusion domain almost only one kind of abductive inference is taken under consideration with the aim of developing successful tools to be deployed within a fusion process, namely “Inference to the Best Explanation”. The issues faced in the domain of intelligence and information fusion, dealing with the real world, imply processes which follow the sequences of scientific discovery and proof. Therefore a survey of some key concepts around abductive inference in the domain of epistmology can reveal some principles to be directly applied to the Fusion domain.