People acquire new beliefs in various ways. One of the most important of these is that new beliefs are acquired as a response to experiencing events that one did not expect. This involves a form of inference distinct from both deductive and inductive inference: abductive inference. The concept of abduction is due to the American pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce. Davies and Coltheart (in press) elucidated what Peirce meant by abduction, and identified two problems in his otherwise promising account requiring solution if that account were to become fully workable. Here we propose solutions to these problems and offer an explicit cognitive model of how people derive new beliefs from observations of unexpected events, based on Peirce’s work and Sokolov’s ideas about prediction error triggering new beliefs. We consider that this model casts light not only upon normal processes of belief formation but also upon the formation of delusional beliefs.

人们以各种方式获得新的信念。其中最重要的一项是，新的信念是作为对经历出乎意料的事件的反应而获得的。这涉及一种不同于演绎推理和归纳推理的推理形式：溯因推理。绑架的概念源于美国实用主义哲学家 CS Peirce。Davies 和 Coltheart（正在出版中）阐明了 Peirce 所谓的绑架是什么意思，并指出了他原本很有希望的帐户中的两个问题，如果该帐户变得完全可行，则需要解决该问题。在这里，我们提出了这些问题的解决方案，并基于 Peirce 的工作和 Sokolov 关于预测错误触发新信念的想法，提供了关于人们如何从对意外事件的观察中得出新信念的明确认知模型。