Abstract
Abduction is the process of generating hypotheses for explanation-seeking phenomena (and possibly also non-explanatory problems). While this process has often been taken as no more than spontaneous impulse, Peirce held that it was an inference. Today, apart from Peirce’s original statement of the abductive inference, the Gabbay-Woods model (or simply the GW model) is presumably the most prominent account of it. This model is introduced and evaluated. One main problem is seen in the delimitation of the abductive task and the criterion for the validity of abduction. Here, the GW-model and other accounts appear to be vague, and this vagueness might be due to the all too well-known confusion of abduction with inference to the best explanation (IBE). In what follows, abduction is first analyzed in its overall connection with deduction and induction, then in terms of inferential sub-processes (i.e., colligation, observation, and judgment), and finally with respect to the validity criterion for abduction, which is seen in “coherence.” In the section that follows, the concept of coherence is discussed, especially against the backdrop of it being taken as a criterion for “truth.” Here, the processes of generating hypotheses and (dis-)confirming them have to be kept as strictly apart as abduction and IBE. Based on the idea that abduction basically consists in making incoherent pieces of information coherent, the final part discusses how far non-deliberative cognitive functioning can be understood in terms of abduction, particularly in terms of abductive inferences, and what this means for the overall project of pragmatism.
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Minnameier, G. (2023). The Logical Process and Validity of Abductive Inferences. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10135-9_3
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