On the Emergence of Reasons in Inductive Logic

We apply methods of abduction derived from propositional probabilistic reasoning to predicate probabilistic reasoning, in particular inductive logic, by treating finite predicate knowledge bases as potentially infinite propositional knowledge bases. It is shown that for a range of predicate knowledge bases (such as those typically associated with inductive reasoning) and several key propositional inference processes (in particular the Maximum Entropy Inference Process) this procedure is well defined, and furthermore yields an explanation for the validity of the induction in terms of ‘reasons’.