Abstract: As a philosophical term in English, ‘abduction’ was originally a seventeenth century translation of a Latin term used by Renaissance logicians. It was adopted in 1898 by Charles S. Peirce who gave it a significant role in his system. Peirce (1839–1914) was the founder of American pragmatism, well-known and appreciated for his studies in formal logic and probabilistic reasoning. He argued already in 1865 that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third type of inference which he called ’hypothesis’, ‘presumption’, ‘retroduction’, or ‘abduction’. This is reasoning from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. Peirce’s account of this ampliative inference changed in important ways during the 50 years between 1865 and 1914. After Peirce’s death, his ideas gradually become known with the publication of six volumes of his Collected Papers (CP) in 1931–1935. Peirce’s conception of abductive reasoning became a hot topic in the philosophy of science after World War II, when N. R. Hanson suggested that abduction is a logic of discovery, Gilbert Harman argued that all types of inductive reasoning can be reduced to inference to the best explanation (IBE), Howard Smokler analyzed abduction as an important method of confirmation, and Larry Laudan treated abduction as an instruction for the pursuit of a hypothetical theory. In this chapter, we shall follow Peirce’s steps in discussing abduction by analyzing its logical and probabilistic forms (Sects. 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3), its main interpretations (Sect. 1.4), and some current debates about Peirce’s distinctions (Sect. 1.5).
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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