Argumentation, Objectivity, and Bias: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) (
2016)
Copy
BIBTEX
Abstract
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.