> 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 th

> 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).