This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...) author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce’s own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking. (shrink)

El presente artículo toma como excusa un análisis de la película Doce hombres en punga para introducir, con ánimo propedéutico, tres cuestiones: i) el núcleo conceptual de la retórica, ii) el razonamiento abductivo, y iii) la relación entre argumentación y emociones. Sobre la primera cuestión se proponen tres discusiones: el puesto del logos, el pathos y el ethos en la retórica, la relación entre retórica y dialéctica, y la idea de persuasión. Sobre la segunda se exponen las tres dimensiones de (...) la abducción para una compresión adecuada: la inferencial, la metodológica y la intuitiva. La tercera cuestión queda perfilada con algunas sugerencias sobre el papel de las emociones en la argumentación y la exigencia de una ética mínima para el ejercicio retórico. Esas tres cuestiones no son neutras y suponen profundas discusiones. (shrink)

Since everyday abductive arguments convey the arguer’s individual interpretation of reality, they often exhibit a weak relationship between the premise and the conclusion. After all, what seems obvious to the arguer may appear far-fetched to an opponent. This paper examines some presentational devices that contribute to an arguer’s rhetorical goal of presenting the argument in such a way that the conclusion is suggested to be the result of a thorough investigative procedure.

Henrike Jansen’s “The strategic formulation of abductive arguments in everyday reasoning” insightfully explores the terrain of abductive argumentation. The purpose of this note is to continue the exploration along lines marked out by her paper. This further exploration proceeds in two stages. Section 2 of the paper addresses the nature of abductive inference by distinguishing two types of abduction, identifying some of abduction’s formal and nonformal properties, and relating abduction to enthymematic inference. Section 3 focuses on some of Jansen’s examples, (...) paying particular attention to the distinction between abduction and argument from sign. Whereas Jansen maintains that some arguments from sign are not abductive, the paper suggests an alternative perspective from which arguments from sign can generally be viewed as one sort of abductive inference. (shrink)