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- Robert G. Burton (1999). A Neurocomputational Approach to Abduction. Minds and Machines 9 (2).Recent developments in the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence suggest ways of answering the most serious challenge to Peirce's notion of abduction. Either there is no such logical process as abduction or, if abduction is a form of inference, it is essentially unconscious and therefore beyond rational control so that it lacks any normative significance. Peirce himself anticipates and attempts to answer this challenge. Peirce argues that abduction is both a source of creative insight and a form of logical inference subject to a degree of conscious control. In this paper I shall sketch a developing account of abduction that is suggested by the work of Paul Churchland, Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith, William Wimsatt, Owen Flanagan, and others. I shall argue that a credible account of abduction will require that we approach the phenomenon from both higher and lower levels as represented by these approaches.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peircean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peircean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In (...)
It is well known that the process of scientific inquiry, according to Peirce, is drivenby three types of inference, namely abduction, deduction, and induction. What isbehind these labels is, however, not so clear. In particular, the common identificationof abduction with Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) begs the question,since IBE appears to be covered by Peirce's concept of induction, not that of abduction.Consequently, abduction ought to be distinguished from IBE, at least on Peirce's account. The main aim of the paper, (...)
In this article, I compare two varieties of abduction as reconstructive models for analysing discovery. The first is 'Hansonian abduction', which is based on N. R. Hanson's formulations of abduction. The other is 'Harmanian abduction', the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) model, formulated especially by Gilbert Harman. Peter Lipton has analysed processes of discovery on the basis of his developed form of Harmanian abduction. I argue that Hansonian abduction would, however, be a more apt model for this purpose. As (...)
Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) made relevant contributions to deductive logic, but he was primarily interested in the logic of science, and more especially in what he called 'abduction' (as opposed to deduction and induction), which is the process whereby hypotheses are generated in order to explain the surprising facts. Indeed, Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research, but of all ordinary human activities. Nevertheless, in spite of Peirce's work and writings in the field of (...)
There are various ``classical'' argumentsagainst abduction as a logic of discovery,especially that (1) abduction is too weak amode of inference to be of any use, and (2) inbasic formulation of abduction the hypothesisis already presupposed to be known, so it isnot the way hypotheses are discovered in thefirst place. In this paper I argue, bybringing forth the idea of strategies,that these counter-arguments are weaker thanmay appear. The concept of strategiessuggests, inter alia, that many inferentialmoves are taken into account at the (...)
The aim of my paper is to highlight that for Peirce the reality of God makes sense of the whole scientific enterprise. The belief in God is a natural product of abduction, of the "rational instinct" or educated guess of the scientist or the layman, and also the abduction of God may be understood as a "proof" of pragmatism. Moreover, I want to suggest that for Peirce scientific activity is a genuine religious enterprise, perhaps even the religious activity par excellence, (...)
Jaakko Hintikka (1998) has argued that clarifying the notion of abduction is the fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology. One traditional interpretation of Peirce on abduction sees it as a recipe for generating new theoretical discoveries . A second standard view sees abduction as a mode of reasoning that justifies beliefs about the probable truth of theories. While each reading has some grounding in Peirce's writings, each leaves out features that are crucial to Peirce's distinctive understanding of abduction. I develop and (...)
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