Abstract
Research on design theory and research on abduction have long developed in two parallel streams without connections. However, some researchers have noticed that design and abduction might be fruitfully connected: they identified some forms of abduction in design processes and characterized the variety, and even uniqueness, of forms of abduction in design. Following this stream of work, this chapter includes an analysis of how design theory might help uncover some critical properties of abduction and, conversely, how this analysis might also help uncover particular facets of design, namely, the logic of preservative generativity. More specifically, in recent years, research on design theory has contributed to reconstructing a basic science, design theory, that accounts for the logic of generativity. Moreover, design theory developed without relying on the notion of abduction. Hence, design theory appears as an interesting scientific analytical framework to analyze the generativity logic of design abduction and, more generally, abduction in science. It leads to making two main propositions: (1) abduction descriptions actually tend to underestimate the potential of the generativity of abduction, making it a form of “bounded generativity,” and (2) unbounding generativity in abduction would lead to discuss the relationship between generativity and preservation in the construction of scientific hypotheses.
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Kroll, E., Le Masson, P., Weil, B. (2023). Abduction and Design Theory: Disentangling the Two Notions to Unbound Generativity in Science. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10135-9_47
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