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The term "abduction" was coined by CS Peirce to describe the process that puts hypotheses on the docket to be tried by induction and deduction. Sometimes folks

The term "abduction" was coined by CS Peirce to describe the process that puts hypotheses on the docket to be tried by induction and deduction. Sometimes folks use it to mean something like "inference to best explanation", but that's not how Peirce meant it. > Proposals for hypotheses inundate us in an overwhelming flood, while the process of verification to which each one must be subjected before it can count as at all an item, even of likely knowledge, is so very costly in time, energy, and money -- and consequently in ideas which might have been had for that time, energy, and money, that Economy would override every other consideration even if there were any other serious considerations. In fact there are no others. For abduction commits us to nothing. It merely causes a hypothesis to be set down upon our docket of cases to be tried. — CS Peirce (Collected Papers §5.602)

routerl 4y ago
> abduction commits us to nothing. It merely causes a hypothesis to be set down upon our docket of cases to be tried. This is the perfect phrasing. Consider the contrast with deduction: if I have a premise, P, there are many deductive inferential rules I could apply to that premise to produce a new truth. E.g. Given P, we can infer "not not P", and if we're also given "P implies Q" we can infer Q Abduction flips this on its head: we have Q. And Q could be just the double negation of a P we weren't given. Or it could be the consequence of "P implies Q". There's really no way to know with certainty. This is forensics. It's exactly the reasoning used in courtrooms: from the evidence (or "consequences"), we need to use science and logic to figure out how we got there (i.e. what were the antecedents). This is why the most famous fictional user of "abduction" is Sherlock Holmes. But really it's what every forensic investigator (including a detective) is doing. Abduction is most common in judicial settings (i.e. when we are trying to assign blame).
joe_the_user 4y ago
Ah, That is actually an illuminating perspective cutting through verbiage. Abduction is the first "step", that the produces the ideas that can be considered ... by induction or deduction. It is the principle that we have to start somewhere. Basically, an abductive step is something like "I can think of only ten hypotheses that explain X and only one of them works. I could consider an infinity of possibilities but it's not worth it. I will stick with my working hypothesis".

routerl 4y ago

> abduction commits us to nothing. It merely causes a hypothesis to be set down upon our docket of cases to be tried. This is the perfect phrasing. Consider the contrast with deduction: if I have a premise, P, there are many deductive inferential rules I could apply to that premise to produce a new truth. E.g. Given P, we can infer "not not P", and if we're also given "P implies Q" we can infer Q Abduction flips this on its head: we have Q. And Q could be just the double negation of a P we weren't given. Or it could be the consequence of "P implies Q". There's really no way to know with certainty. This is forensics. It's exactly the reasoning used in courtrooms: from the evidence (or "consequences"), we need to use science and logic to figure out how we got there (i.e. what were the antecedents). This is why the most famous fictional user of "abduction" is Sherlock Holmes. But really it's what every forensic investigator (including a detective) is doing. Abduction is most common in judicial settings (i.e. when we are trying to assign blame).

joe_the_user 4y ago

Ah, That is actually an illuminating perspective cutting through verbiage. Abduction is the first "step", that the produces the ideas that can be considered ... by induction or deduction. It is the principle that we have to start somewhere. Basically, an abductive step is something like "I can think of only ten hypotheses that explain X and only one of them works. I could consider an infinity of possibilities but it's not worth it. I will stick with my working hypothesis".