A defense of the rationality of adductive inference from the criticisms of Bayesian theorists.

I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peireean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peireean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types (...) of scientific reasoning. In particular, I claim that Peireean abduction is an in-depth account of the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, while IBE, at least in Peter Lipton's thorough treatment, is a more encompassing account of the processes both of generating and of evaluating scientific hypotheses. There is then a two-fold problem with the claim that abduction is IBE. On the one hand, it conflates abduction and induction, which are two distinct forms of logical inference, with two distinct aims, as shown by Charles S. Peirce; on the other hand it lacks a clear sense of the full scope of IBE as an account of scientific inference. (shrink)

Peirce believed that inquiry involves three types of reasoning—abduction, deduction, and induction. While Peirce’s beliefs about reasoning, especially abduction, changed over time, in his mature work the following picture of reasoning emerges: abduction generates and chooses hypotheses to test; deduction determines the entailments of a hypothesis; induction ascertains whether the evidence accords with the hypothesis in question.1 Peirce both identified abduction and coined the word.2 His concept of abduction is one of the most original contributions (...) he made to the study of reasoning. It is also one of the most poorly understood. Peirce’s concept of abduction has been distorted by contemporary... (shrink)

The background target of the research going into the present article is to forge an intellectual alliance between, on the one hand, active inference and the free-energy principle (FEP), and on the other, Charles S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics and pragmatism. In the present paper, the focus is on the allegiance between the nomenclatures of active and abductive inferences as the proper place to begin reaching at that wider target. The paper outlines the key conceptual elements involved in a naturalistic (...) rendering of Peirce’s late semiotic and logical notion of abductive reasoning. The target is a cognitive-biological model of abduction which preserves the functional integrity of an organism and fulfils the existential imperative for living beings’ evidence of existence. Such a model is an adaptation of Peirce’s late logical schema of abduction proposed in his largely unpublished works during the early 20th century. The proposed model is argued to be a feasible sketch also of recent breakthroughs in computational (sensu Bayesian) cognitive science. (shrink)

In _Abductive Analysis_, Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans provide a new navigational map for constructing empirically based generalizations in qualitative research. They outline an accessible way to think about observations, methods, and theories that nurtures theory-formation without locking it into predefined conceptual boxes. The authors view research as continually moving back and forth between a set of observations and theoretical generalizations. To craft theory is to then pitch one’s observations in relation to other potential cases, both within and without one’s (...) field. The book provides novel ways to approach the challenges that plague qualitative researchers across the social sciences—how to think about the relation between methods and theories, how to conceptualize causality, how to construct axes of variation, and how to leverage the researcher’s community of inquiry. _Abductive Analysis_ is a landmark work that shows how a pragmatist approach provides a more productive and fruitful way to conduct qualitative research. (shrink)

Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation is a much awaited original contribution to the study of abductive reasoning, providing logical foundations and a rich sample of pertinent applications. Divided into three parts on the conceptual framework, the logical foundations, and the applications, this monograph takes the reader for a comprehensive and erudite tour through the taxonomy of abductive reasoning, via the logical workings of abductive inference ending with applications pertinent to scientific explanation, empirical progress, pragmatism and belief revision.

One task of logic, Peirce held, is to classify arguments so as to determine the validity of each kind. His own classification is interesting because it includes a novel type of argument in addition to the two traditionally recognized types. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss what Peirce thought to be sufficiently distinctive about abduction to warrant calling it a new kind of argument. But since one finds in his writings on abduction a number of (...) different views it is first necessary to make a few remarks concerning the unity of Peirce's thought. (shrink)

In a seminar with the title “Deduction and Induction in the Sciences”, it is intriguing to ask the following questions: Is there a third type of inference besides deduction and induction? Does this third type of inference play a significant role within scientific inquiry? A positive answer to both of these questions was advocated by Charles S. Peirce throughout his career, even though his opinions changed in important ways during the fifty years between 1865 and 1914. Peirce called the third (...) kind of inference “hypothesis”, “abduction”, or “retroduction”.1 In this paper, I shall follow Peirce’s steps in discussing abduction by analyzing its logical form , its role in science , and the grounds of its validity . We shall see that Peirce’s discussion is more insightful than many recent attempts to analyze abductive inference. Still, recently some progress has been made in the treatment of abduction within the Bayesian theory of epistemic probability and truth-approximation . The results of this work support the view of scientific realism: abduction or inference to the best explanation , combined with empirical and experimental testing of scientific theories, is the best method of seeking informative truths in science. (shrink)

Theoretical and manipulative abduction conjectures and manipulations : the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery. -- Non-explanatory and instrumental abduction : plausibility, implausibility, ignorance preservation. -- Semiotic brains and artificial minds : how brains make up material cognitive systems. -- Neuromultimodal abduction : pre-wired brains, embidiment, neurospaces. -- Animal abduction : from mindless organisms to srtifactual mediators. -- Abduction, affordances, and cognitive niches : sharing representations and creating chances through cognitive niche construction. -- Abduction in (...) human and logical agents : hasty generalizers, hybrid abducers, fallacies. -- Morphodynamical abduction : causation of hypotheses by attractors dynamics. (shrink)

Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley used abductive reasoning to draw conclusions about the ionic basis of the action potential. Here we build on that initial proposal. First, we propose that Hodgkin and Huxley’s constitutive abductive reasoning has four features. Second, we argue that Hodgkin and Huxley are not alone in giving such arguments. Tolman, 1948, and Baumgartner, 1960, also gave such arguments. The implication is that such arguments are common enough in science that philosophers of science should pay more attention (...) to them. Third, we propose that constitutive abduction describes a method that scientists use to confirm constitutive hypotheses that is an alternative to the mutual manipulability approach that is familiar in the New Mechanist literature. (shrink)

In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data. It is a common occurrence in everyday life and crops up in such diverse places as medical diagnosis, scientific theory formation, accident investigation, language understanding, and jury deliberation. In recent years, it has become a popular and fruitful topic in artificial intelligence research. This volume breaks new ground in the scientific, philosophical, and technological study of abduction. It presents (...) new ideas about inferential and information-processing foundations for knowledge and certainty. The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference, in contrast to the view that it arises non-inferentially, or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. Much AI research is hypothetical, so the importance of this book is that it reports key discoveries about abduction that have been made as a result of designing, building, testing, and analyzing actual working knowledge-based systems for medical diagnosis and other abductive tasks. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines, RED-1, RED-2, PEIRCE, MDX2, TIPS, QUAWDS, and the discovery of reasoning strategies that make it computationally feasible to form well-justified composite explanatory hypotheses, despite the threat of combinatorial explosion. The final chapter argues that perception is logically abductive and presents a layered-abduction computational model of perceptual information processing. This book will be of great interest to researchers in AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. (shrink)

We present a dynamic approach to Peirce’s original construal of abductive logic as a logic of conjecture making, and provide a new decidable, contraction-free and cut-free proof system for the dynamic logic of abductive inferences with neighborhood semantics. Our formulation of the dynamic logic of abduction follows the philosophical and scientific track that led Peirce to his late, post-1903 characterization of abductive conclusions as investigands, namely invitations to investigate propositions conjectured at the level of pre-beliefs.

An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which select an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical concepts and models. The article focuses on creative abductions, which are essential for scientific progress, although they are rarely discussed in the literature. Scientifically, fruitful creative abductions are demarcated from purely speculative abductions by means of three virtues which are possessed by the former but not by the latter: (i) providing unification, (ii) detecting common (...) causes and (iii) generating novel predictions by means of which they can be independently tested. Based on historical examples it is demonstrated that common cause abduction from correlated dispositions is the fundamental abductive operation by which new theoretical concepts and models are scientifically generated. Statistical factor analysis can be regarded as a statistical generalization of common cause abduction. (shrink)

It is argued, in this paper, that the core operation underlying any measurement—the inverse modelling under uncertainty—is equivalent to quantitative abductive reasoning which consists in the selection of the best estimate of a measurand in a set of admissible solutions, using a priori information: on the measurand, on the measuring system coupled with an object under measurement, and on the influence of the environment including the user of the measurement results. There are two key premises of this claim: a systematic (...) interpretation of measurement in terms of inverse problems, proposed earlier by the author, and a logical link between inverse problems and abduction, identified by the Finnish philosopher of science Ilkka Niiniluoto. The title claim of this paper is illustrated with an expanded example of measuring optical spectrum by means of a low-resolution spectrometer. (shrink)

“Scientific research faces up with an open and unknown world”Within the work of C. S. Peirce, the most fundamental and contentious form of inference is that of abduction. According to Peirce, abduction is the only type of inference from which new ideas are created (CP 5.171, 1903). He wrote, “every single item of scientific theory which stands established today has been due to Abduction” (CP 5.172, 1903). Similarly, “All that makes knowledge applicable comes to us viâ (...) class='Hi'>abduction. […] Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step” (HP 2:899–900, 1901). It is little wonder that so much attention has been paid to this particular type of.. (shrink)

For twenty-five centuries the theory of inference has asked how warrant moves from evidence to conclusion, and its principal instruments, deduction, induction, abduction, Hegelian dialectic, consilience, and Bayesian credence, were each built to answer that question. What none of them answers is whether the evidence structure on which any such move runs is itself sound. Every mode in the tradition presupposes, and cannot certify, the independence and non-degeneracy of its evidence lines: a Bayesian posterior strengthens under a latent common (...) cause that should dissolve the convergence, consilience celebrates an independence it possesses no operational test for, and falsification cannot recognize a falsifier without a verification frame it does not supply. This paper presents Trisduction, a verification architecture operating at the certification layer beneath inference. Complete factual claims decompose, under a reproducible deletion test, into exactly three independent warrant lines, formal, empirical, and registrational; the three lines close geometrically on a fourth point into twelve directed verification conditions; and the verdict takes closed mathematical form, det(R) = (Re(q̂_F q̂_E q̂_ER))², a three-state output, sealed, broken, under-determined, whose admissible functional class is provably closed. The architecture's primary discriminator is provable and testable: on collinear evidence a Bayesian posterior strictly increases while the verdict determinant vanishes identically, and no weighted aggregation of positive inputs can vanish on collinear data, with the 2014 BICEP2 announcement and its Planck dust resolution supplying the worked historical case and an eight-check executable battery reproducing the verdict identities at machine precision on any floating-point substrate. If the analysis stands, the long search for epistemic certainty terminates the way genuine searches terminate, in a classification: indefeasibility is provably unattainable for finite verifiers, maximal warrant is attainable and its instrument is closed, and each historical mode survives, completed, at the one layer it actually occupies. (shrink)

This paper argues that Umberto Eco had a sophisticated theory of abductive reasoning and that this theory is fundamentally akin to Peirce’s both in the analysis and in the justification of this kind of reasoning. The first section expounds the essentials of Peirce’s theory of abduction, and explains how Peirce moved from seeing abduction as a kind of reasoning to seeing it as a stage of the larger process of inquiry. The second section deals with one of Eco’s (...) paradigmatic examples of abduction, i.e., William of Baskerville’s abduction concerning the horse Brunellus in the overture of The Name of the Rose, and shows that, just like in Peirce’s three-stages model of inquiry, William’s abductions are verified by means of deduction and induction. The third section examines the problem of the justification of abductive reasoning, and argues that both Peirce and Eco solved this problem through the idea that the justification of abduction is itself abductive (meta-abduction in Eco, ur-abduction in Peirce). (shrink)

This paper presents arguments and evidence from psychology and neuroscience supporting Lipton’s 2004 claim that scientists create knowledge through an abductive process that he calls “Inference to the Best Explanation”. The paper develops two conclusions. Conclusion 1 is that without conscious effort on our part, our brains use a process very similar to abduction as a powerful way of interpreting sensory information. To support Conclusion 1, evidence from psychology and neuroscience is presented that suggests that what we humans perceive (...) through our senses is not reality, but rather, our ‘brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory input. The implication of this best guessing is that our brains use a process very similar to abduction throughout our lives to inform us of what is happening in the world around us. In addition, an argument based on Darwinian evolution is presented claiming that our brains do an excellent job of interpreting sensory information from the outside world. (If they did not, we, as a species, could hardly have survived.) Combining these two claims leads to Conclusion 1. Building on Conclusion 1, Conclusion 2 is that Lipton and others are correct in claiming that scientists use abduction when creating scientific theories. Abduction must be strong, because Nature chose abduction for its own sensemaking purposes. This paper’s contribution to knowledge is in pointing out that recent psychological and neuroscientific research has major implications for the philosophical world’s confidence in the probable validity of abductive inference. The punchline is simple: Nature chose abduction! (shrink)

The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure of the degree of theory-confirmation this yields. The issue of confirmation for an entire framework (e.g., Newtonian mechanics en bloc, as opposed, say, to Newton’s theory of gravitation) either does not arise, or is dismissed in so far as frameworks are thought not to be the kind of (...) thing that admits scientific confirmation. I argue that there is another form of scientific reasoning that has not received philosophical attention, what I call Newtonian abduction, that does provide confirmation for frameworks as a whole, and does so in two novel ways. (In particular, Newtonian abduction is not inference to the best explanation, but rather is closer to Peirce’s original idea of abduction.) I further argue that Newtonian abduction is at least as important a form of reasoning in science as standard deductive and inductive forms. The form is beautifully summed up by Maxwell (Proc Camb Philos Soc II:292–294, 1876): “The true method of physical reasoning is to begin with the phenomena and to deduce the forces from them by a direct application of the equations of motion.”. (shrink)

Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 404-418, December 2021.

ABSTRACT Abduction as a method for sociological explanation is increasingly gaining interest, but questions remain as to what exactly it is and how it differs from other methods of inquiry. This paper compares abduction as conceived in Peircean pragmatism with the critical realist concept of retroduction. I argue that abduction in the Peircean sense and retroduction in the critical realist sense refer to different, but complementary, modes of inference. Abductive conclusions provide the starting point for retroductive inferences; (...) the latter inform the tenability of the former. Together, abduction and retroduction contribute to theoretical explanation. (shrink)

The relationship between Peircean abduction and the modern notion of Inference to the Best Explanation is a matter of dispute. Some philosophers, such as Harman :88–95, 1965) and Lipton, claim that abduction and IBE are virtually the same. Others, however, hold that they are quite different :503, 1998; Minnameier in Erkenntnis 60:75–105, 2004) and there is no link between them :419–442, 2009). In this paper, I argue that neither of these views is correct. I show that abduction (...) and IBE have important similarities as well as differences. Moreover, by bringing a historical perspective to the study of the relationship between abduction and IBE—a perspective that is lacking in the literature—I show that their differences can be well understood in terms of two historic developments in the history of philosophy of science: first, Reichenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification—and the consequent jettisoning of the context of discovery from philosophy of science—and second, underdetermination of theory by data. (shrink)

I will analyse three fundamental ways of governing ignorance though abduction, which are essential from an eco-cognitive and eco-logical point of view, in which the central role in human cognition of natural and artefactual environment is taken into account. First of all, according to the so-called GW-schema, proposed by Gabbay and Woods, abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character: given the fact that the abduced hypotheses aim at becoming truths, the basic ignorance is neither solved nor left untouched. (...) Second, I will contend that abduction is not always ignorance preserving but also knowledge enhancing. Indeed, according to the eco-cognitive model of abduction, I myself have recently proposed, we can easily see that, occasionally, knowledge can be immediately increased (and ignorance ‘killed’) through abduction: in this perspective, abduction does not have to be rigidly conceptualized as an inference to the best explanation in the received sense, which is as an inference that, to grant truth, also takes advantage of an empirical evaluation phase or an inductive phase, as Peirce classified it. Finally, it is important to stress that abductive cognition is at the roots of two fundamental cognitive processes. On one side, abductive cognition constructs (and/or takes advantage of the exploitation of) embodiments, external representations, enactions, artefacts and props, which involve ignorant entities suitably transformed in cognitive representations and/or devices. On the other side, abductive cognition dominates those ‘special’ cognitive creative processes that lead to what I call the disseminated ‘computational domestication of ignorant entities’: I will illustrate the example of the recent unconventional computational domestication of ignorant entities, which creates novel cognitive embodiments (morphological computation). (shrink)

This paper challenges traditional accuracy-centric accounts of rationality by synthesising the Free Energy Principle (FEP) with Charles Peirce’s pragmatist epistemology. Whereas the FEP frames cognition as a biological imperative to minimise surprise through predictive models, we argue that its normative force emerges when integrated with Peircean abduction and skill-based metrics. By reinterpreting rationality through skill scores—Peirce’s 1884 method for evaluating rare-event predictions—we demonstrate that survival-driven inference prioritises context-sensitive skill over abstract accuracy. The FEP’s variational free-energy minimisation aligns with (...) class='Hi'>abduction’s dynamic conjecture-making, revealing rationality as a pragmatic negotiation between organismic survival and environmental complexity. Critically, we show that Bayesian accuracy measures (e.g., Kullback–Leibler divergence) fail to capture the adequacy conditions for skillful forecasting, whereas Peirce’s skill score satisfies constraints such as error weighting and directionality. This fusion of FEP and pragmatism advances a naturalistic-normative framework in which rationality is grounded in adaptive, enactive inference rather than idealised coherence, bridging computational neuroscience and theoretical biology with philosophical accounts of inquiry. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Husserlian variation, Bergsonian intuition and Peircean abduction are contrasted as methodological responses to the traditional philosophical problem of deriving knowledge of universals from singulars. Each method implies a correspondingly different view of the generation of the variations from which knowledge is derived. To make sense of the latter differences, and to distinguish the different sorts of variation sought by philosophers and scientists, a distinction between extensive, intensive, and abductive-intensive variation is introduced. The link between philosophical method and the generation (...) of variation is used to illuminate different philosophical conceptions of nature and nature's relation to meaning and sense. (shrink)

In this paper we explore a generalization of traditional abduction which can simultaneously perform two different tasks: given an unprovable sequent Γ ⊢ G, find a sentence H such that Γ, H ⊢ G is provable ; given a provable sequent Γ ⊢ G, find a sentence H such that Γ ⊢ H and the proof of Γ, H ⊢ G is simpler than the proof of Γ ⊢ G. We argue that the two tasks should not be distinguished, (...) and present a general procedure for finding suitable hypotheses or lemmas. When the original sequent is provable, the abduced formula can be seen as a cut formula with respect to Gentzen's sequent calculus, so the abduction method is cut-based. Our method is based on the tableau-like system KE and we argue for its advantages over existing abduction methods based on traditional Smullyan-style Tableaux. (shrink)

Although the relevance and importance of his work has been recognized only belatedly, Charles Sanders Peirce was, throughout his life, a careful student and significant contributor to the development of logic, scientific theory, and philosophy generally. Occasionally, complete appreciation of Peirce's efforts has been hampered because his work is often unique and, at times, highly idiosyncratic. Yet, we hope to show in this paper that for one aspect of his work in logic Peirce did not abandon the ordinary without purpose. (...) Only relatively recently have philosophers of science become interested in the logic of discovery - that is, in the logic of the selection of hypotheses to be tested rather than simply in the ways of testing hypotheses which have already been selected. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of the fundamental guidelines according to René Girard’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth. After close examination, it appears Girard’s methodology is based on four complementary levels: (1) the common-sense tracking of sacrificial substitutions; (2) the careful analysis of symmetries and dissymmetries in mythical texts; (3) the identification of cross-cultural and historical persecution stereotypes; (4) the application of the common standard of evidence (i.e. guilty beyond a reasonable doubt) for criminal conviction. (...) Throughout the paper, we will show that Girard’s approach bears strong resemblance with William Whewell’s method of consilience as well as Charles Sanders Peirce’s views of the historical sciences. (shrink)

The paper discusses how abduction relates tochildren's early acquisition of words, and has three sections: (a) a brief description of Peirce's notion of abduction; (b) a developmentof a hypothesis for the content-related symbolic functioning of words; and (c)arguments that children's knowledge of such functioning involves two kinds of abduction. In (b), children's knowledge of the content-related symbolic functioning of words is argued to consist in practical knowledge ofhow to use words to direct attention to kindsof things. To (...) acquire such knowledge, a childmust form a practical causal hypothesis aboutthe kind of thing to which a word directs attention. I argue that forming such ahypothesis involves abduction. On the basis of empirical work of several developmentalists, I also argue that children use abduction notmerely in forming practical hypotheses for the functioning of their earliest words, but also in forming theoretical hypotheses about core(as contrasted perceptual and functional)features of natural and artificial kinds. (shrink)

I examine and resolve an exegetical dichotomy between two main interpretations of Peirce’s theory of abduction, namely, the Generative Interpretation and the Pursuitworthiness Interpretation. According to the former, abduction is the instinctive process of generating explanatory hypotheses through a mental faculty called insight. According to the latter, abduction is a rule-governed procedure for determining the relative pursuitworthiness of available hypotheses and adopting the worthiest one for further investigation—such as empirical tests—based on economic considerations. It is shown that (...) the Generative Interpretation is inconsistent with a fundamental fact of logic for Peirce—i.e., abduction is a kind of inference—and the Pursuitworthiness Interpretation is flawed and inconsistent with Peirce’s naturalistic explanation for the possibility of science and his view about the limitations of classical scientific method. Changing the exegetical locus classicus from the logical form of abduction to insight and economy of research, I argue for the Unified Interpretation according to which abduction includes both instinctive hypotheses-generation and rule-governed hypotheses-ranking. I show that the Unified Interpretation is immune to the objections raised successfully against the Generative and the Pursuitworthiness interpretations. (shrink)

Several tasks in artificial intelligence require the ability to find models about knowledge dynamics. They include belief revision, fusion and belief merging, and abduction. In this paper, we exploit the algebraic framework of mathematical morphology in the context of propositional logic and define operations such as dilation or erosion of a set of formulas. We derive concrete operators, based on a semantic approach, that have an intuitive interpretation and that are formally well behaved, to perform revision, fusion and (...) class='Hi'>abduction. Computation and tractability are addressed, and simple examples illustrate the main results. (shrink)

This paper posits Peirce’s logical category of abduction as a necessary component in the learning process. Because of the cardinality of categories, Thirdness always contains in itself the Firstness of abduction. In psychological terms, abduction can be interpreted as intuition or insight. The paper suggests that abduction can be modeled as a vector on a complex plane. Such geometrical interpretation of the triadic sign helps to clarify the paradox of new knowledge that haunted us since Plato (...) first articulated it in his Meno dialogue. Some implications for the actual teaching practice are addressed, and the value of practical knowledge affirmed. (shrink)

This chapter presents a holistic foundation for abduction which allows its understanding to be expanded beyond its present conceptual boundaries. The conventional epistemic characterization of abduction is based on subject-object duality and predicated on underlying cognitive representations having a propositional form. We argue that this perspective is too narrow. By drawing on and blending Kitarō Nishida’s logic of Absolute Nothingness and C.S Peirce’s conceptions of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, we expand the notion of abduction to be a (...) foundational process that manifests differently according to different qualities of being, having either an ontological phenomenological character, or an epistemic character, depending on the nature of that way being. It is our hope that this holistic framing of abduction will open up new avenues of investigation into what abduction ultimately is. (shrink)

Among the classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce is often regarded as the most removed from practical affairs; he is seen as the most ‘scientific’. The aim of this article is to show his practical usefulness in daily affairs in determining that ‘which is the case’. The abductive inference had a pivotal role in his pragmatist theory of inquiry. As Umberto Eco has shown, abduction is as equally central in the writing of detective stories as it is in the making (...) of science. Recently, abduction has gained a renewed interest not only in the idea that science is basically ‘conjectural’ (Ginzburg and Popper), but also in different versions of critical realism. Here abduction gains interest as a ‘theoretical inference’ of special concern for the social sciences. An overview of various usages of abduction, from Eco to Bhaskar, is followed by a critical pragmatist assessment. (shrink)

This is an examination of similarities and differences between Atocha Aliseda’s semantic tableaux analysis of abduction and Dov Gabbay’s and the present author’s ignorance-preservation model of it. Also discussed is the suitability of these models for the analysis of the logical structure of legal reasoning.

Peirce’s claims that methodeutic “concerns abduction alone” and that “pragmatism contributes to the security of reasoning but hardly to its uberty” are explained. They match as soon as a third claim is taken into account, namely that “pragmatism is the logic of abduction,” not of deduction or induction. Since methodeutic concerns abduction and not deduction or induction, it follows that pragmatism is a maxim of methodeutic. Then, since pragmatism contributes to the security of reasoning but not to (...) its uberty, it follows that methodeutic contributes to the security of the only reasoning it is concerned with, namely abduction. We then explain two related issues of methodeutic of abduction. First, in addition to the maxim of pragmatism, which suggests how to choose among experimental hypotheses contributing to the security of reasoning, there is the maxim of simplicity, which suggests hypotheses that are preferable for investment and which contributes to uberty of reasoning. Second, a third maxim of abduction is economy, which suggests adopting hypotheses that contribute to the advantageousness of reasoning even when pragmatism and simplicity cease to apply. These three maxims—experientiality for security, simplicity for uberty, and economy for advantageousness—are the bedrocks of Peirce’s methodeutic of abduction. (shrink)