Quantum Abduction: A New Paradigm for Reasoning under Uncertainty

Abstract

Abductive reasoning - the search for plausible explanations - has long been central to human inquiry, from forensics to medicine and scientific discovery. Yet formal approaches in AI have largely reduced abduction to eliminative search: hypotheses are treated as mutually exclusive, evaluated against consistency constraints or probability updates, and pruned until a single "best" explanation remains. This reductionist framing overlooks the way human reasoners sustain multiple explanatory lines in suspension, navigate contradictions, and generate novel syntheses. This paper introduces quantum abduction, a non-classical paradigm that models hypotheses in superposition, allows them to interfere constructively or destructively, and collapses only when coherence with evidence is reached. Grounded in quantum cognition and implemented with modern NLP embeddings and generative AI, the framework supports dynamic synthesis rather than premature elimination. Case studies span historical mysteries (Ludwig II of Bavaria, the "Monster of Florence"), literary demonstrations ("Murder on the Orient Express"), medical diagnosis, and scientific theory change. Across these domains, quantum abduction proves more faithful to the constructive and multifaceted nature of human reasoning, while offering a pathway toward expressive and transparent AI reasoning systems.