Abstract
We can witness the recent surge of interest in classifying different patterns or types of abduction. Many philosophers, including Thagard, Magnani, Gabbay and Woods, Schurz, and Hoffmann, have suggested their own classifications emphasizing different aspects of abduction.
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Notes
- 1.
‘A’ for Aliseda, ‘K’ for Kowalski, Kuipers, and Kakas et al., and ‘M’ for Magnani, and Meheus et al. in AKM model, and ‘G’ for Gabbay, and ‘W’ for Woods in GW model.
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One anonymous reviewer points out that my presentation of different views about the possibility of non-explanatory abduction as if there is a serious controversy is misguided. The reviewer writes: “One the one hand, clearly there are views against non-explanatory abduction (such as Hoffmann’s, as the author rightly identifies), but on the other hand, there are also some views which simply do not include non-explanatory abduction without being against, such as those “logical”, identified with (some) parts of the AKM approach. Still others, do include non-explanatory abduction (e.g. Magnani) in their treatment, but are not solely committed to it”. I am indebted to the reviewer for this perceptive comment. But, if there are such a subtle nuanced difference among the philosophers about the possibility of non-explanatory abduction, isn’t it rather natural to detect some potentially controversial issue?
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Another interesting fact is that there were several philosophers, like Spencer, Fiske, Wundt, who placed philosophy below the special sciences (Kent 1987, p. 91).
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One anonymous reviewer doubts whether this is so: “Peirce’s early classification is based on syllogisms, and I do not see where the “conflation” is found”. According to the reviewer, my quotes by Peirce in Sect. 3.2 are by no means a proof of this alleged “conflation”. I find this criticism extremely interesting. Above all, thanks to the reviewer, I realize that I have been simply assuming that Peirce himself had difficulties in separating induction and abduction. Even if my assumption is ungrounded, that would not damage what I pursue in this subsection based on it. I agree that there is a need to examine my assumption critically. But I am afraid that it could be a digression if I indulge in such an examination here.
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Originally published in Popular Science Monthly, vol. 13, pp. 470–482 in 1878.
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Peirce’s trilogy of natural sciences, i.e., science of theory, classificatory sciences, and sciences of hypothesis, reappeared in his 1889 classification with different names of nomological, classificatory and descriptive. Since then, it became one of the persistent features in most of Peirce’s varied classifications of sciences. Though Peirce constantly changed the names of its three members, it appeared in 1892, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1902, and 1903 classifications (Kent 1987, pp. 94, 97–98, 101–102, 104–105, 106–107, 115–116, 134–135).
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Similar line of thought is found in Fann (1970). For he writes, “An interesting point to be noted is the fact that up until the end of the 19th century, Peirce always listed the three modes of inference according to degrees of certainty, namely: deduction, induction, and hypothetic inference. After he came to regard them as the three stages in an inquiry the list became: abduction, deduction and induction” (Fann 1970, p. 31). It may not be a coincidence, since Fann (1970) was written as his M.A. thesis under Max Fisch in 1963, according to Fann’s Preface to the monograph.
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Originally published as “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis”, Popular Science Monthly 13, (August 1878), 470–82. Curiously, it is hard to find substantial discussion of this text in the huge literature on Peirce. Goudge (1950) contrasts the three different kinds of abduction as referring to (1) “unobserved facts”, (2) “facts not only unobserved but physically incapable of being observed by the investigator”, and (3) “entities which in the present state of knowledge are both factually and theoretically incapable of being observed” (Goudge 1950, p. 196).
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For example, Peirce wrote: “But suppose we wish to test the hypothesis that a man is a Catholic Priest, that is, has all the characters that are common to Catholic priests and peculiar to them. Now characters are not units, nor do they consist of units, nor can they be counted, in such a sense that one count is right and every other wrong. Characters have to be estimated according to their significance. The consequence is that there will be a certain element of guess-work in such an induction; so that I call it an abductory induction” (Peirce’s emphasis) [CP 6.526]. Can we say that the later Peirce was more concerned with studying how the three stages of inquiry, i.e., abduction, deduction, and induction, were intermingled or intertwined than classifying each stages? Can we say further, even when classifying induction or deduction, it was the role of the abductive element that secured the basis of such classifications? The answers to these questions should be positive at least to the case of induction, as we discussed above. Perhaps, we might expect the same situation in the case of deduction. Can’t we say, for example, that Peirce’s distinction between theorematical and corollarial deduction is also based on some elements of abduction? The recent discussions of the role of abduction in mathematical reasoning may point to the same conclusion.
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Cf. Atocha Aliseda’s interesting comments: “On the other hand, some authors take induction as an instance of abduction. Abduction as inference to the best explanation is considered by Harman [Har65] as the basic form of non-deductive inference, which includes (enumerative) induction as a special case.
This confusion returns in artificial intelligence. ‘Induction’ is used for the process of learning from examples—but also for creating a theory to explain the observed facts [Sha91]. Thus making abduction an instance of induction. Abduction is usually restricted to producing abductive explanations in the form of facts. When the explanations are rules, it is regarded as part of induction” (Aliseda 2006, p. 34).
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“The model of inference to the Best Explanation is designed to give a partial account of many inductive inferences, both in science and in ordinary life. One version of the model was developed under the name “abduction by Charles Sanders Peirce early in the twentieth century, and the model has been considerably developed and discussed over the last 25 years (see Peirce 1931–1958). Its governing idea is that explanatory considerations are a guide to inference, that scientists infer from the available evidence to the hypothesis which would, if correct, best explain that evidence” (Lipton 2000, p. 184); “The model of inference to the best explanation (IBE) is designed to give a partial account of many inductive inferences, both in science and in ordinary life. One version of the model was developed under the name “abduction” by Charles Sanders Peirce early in the twentieth century, and the model has been considerably developed and discussed over the last four decades (e.g., Harman 1965; Thagard 1978; Day and Kincaid 1994; Barnes 1995; Psillos 2002; Lipton 2004). Its governing idea is that explanatory considerations are a guide to inference, that scientists infer from the available evidence to the hypothesis which would, if correct, best explain that evidence” (Lipton 2008, 193).
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Regarding these two senses of abduction, Magnani gives some further comments, which also deserve serious examination: “It is clear that the two meanings are related to the distinction between hypothesis generation and hypothesis evaluation, so abduction is the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, and induction matches the hypothetico-deductive method of hypothesis testing (1st meaning). However, we have to remember (as we have already stressed) that sometimes in the literature (and also in Peirce’s texts) the word abduction is also referred to the whole cycle, that is as an inference to the best explanation (2nd meaning)” (Magnani 2009, p. 18).
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In addition to our discussion in Sect. 3.2, please note what Magnani points out about this matter. “As Thagard has pointed out (1988, p. 53) the question was controversial in Peirce’s writings too. Before the 1890s, Peirce discussed the hypothesis as follows: “Hypothesis is where we find some very curious circumstance which would be explained by the supposition that it was the case of a certain general rule, and thereupon adopt that supposition” (Peirce 1931–1958, 2.624]. When Peirce replaced hypothesis with abduction he said that it “furnishes the reasoner with the problematic theory which induction verifies” (Peirce 1931–1958, 2.776). Thagard ascribes to the editors of Peirce’s work the responsibility for having clouded this change in his thinking by including discussions of hypothesis under the heading of “Abduction”, “[…] obscuring his shift from the belief that inference to an explanatory hypothesis can be a kind of justification to the weaker view that it is only a form of discovery” (Magnani 2009, p. 18).
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In this connection, please refer to Minnameier’s disclaimer regarding his project (Minnameier 2004, 77).
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Throughout this chapter, I tried to make clear how much I value Schurz’s achievement in his attempt to classify abduction. Even so, there still might be people who doubt whether I have been unfair to Schurz. I would kindly ask them not to forget the fact that Schurz explicitly equated abduction with IBE.
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In some sense, such a failure to deal with the problem of classifying abduction in some disciplines other than natural science is partly due to Peirce himself. Let us think about ethics as a clear example. There is no doubt that ethics is a huge field in which abductive reasoning must have a significant role. Nevertheless, it is hard to find a text where Peirce analyzes the structure of abductive moral reasoning. Curiously enough, philosophers and historians of philosophy have discussed Peirce’s classification of philosophy much more extensively than his classification of natural science [for example, see Anderson (1995), Kent (1987) and Goudge (1950)]. Thus, if Peirce had discussed the problem of classifying abduction in morality, it would have been studied enthusiastically. We have no intention to plunge into this Peircean scholarship here. According to most scholarly opinions, Peirce seems rather reluctant to discuss problems of morality in spite of his extensive reading of moral philosophy. As Krois reports, “[f]or most of his life Peirce rejected explicitly the possibility and wisdom of developing a “philosophical” ethics and so he never wrote a work entitled “Ethics” (Krois 1994, p. 27). Also, it was quite late when Peirce placed ethics as one of the normative sciences within his classification of science. In his 1892 classification, ethics is found together with political economy, poetry, music, and games under the rubric of “practical psychics”. According to Kent’s commentary, here not only Comte’s principle is working, but the broad divisions themselves are “not very different from Comte’s own”, where ethics is together with theology, politics, law, and etiquette “subsumed under sociology” (Kent 1987, pp. 94–95). It is only in Peirce’s classification of 1897, when ethics appears, with logic and metaphysics, as philosophy (Ibid., p. 104). Finally, together with esthetics and logic, ethics is presented as one of the normative sciences in his classification around 1902 (Ibid., p. 115). For these reasons, it is hopeless to learn from Peirce how to classify abduction in morality.
On the other hand, recent studies of abduction have extended their reach far enough to cover morality as well as all other disciplines other than natural science. Magnani’s recent work such as Morality in a Technological World: Knowledge as Duty (Magnani 2007) or Understanding Violence (Magnani 2011) is a clear example. Gabbay and Woods’s The Reach of Abduction: Insight and Trial (Gabbay and Woods 2005) opens an entirely new field, i.e., the study of non-explanatory abduction. In particular, they discuss abductive reasoning in law, which they continue to do so in their subsequent work (Gabbay and Woods 2010a, b, c; Woods 2010).
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Park, W. (2017). On Classifying Abduction. In: Abduction in Context. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48956-8_2
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