Abstract

Charles S. Peirce’s conception of abductive reasoning became a hot topic in the philosophy of science after World War II, when N. R. Hanson suggested that abduction is a logic of discovery, Gilbert Harman argued that all types of inductive reasoning can be reduced to inference to the best explanation, and Howard Smokler suggested that abduction as inverse deduction is an important method of confirmation. Abduction has been a popular theme also in Artificial Intelligence. Illustrations and examples of abduction have been sought in everyday life, detective stories, and many scientific disciplines from astronomy to medicine. Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans have published a book on qualitative...