Defending Abduction

Ilkka Niiniluoto

DOI:10.1086/392744

Corpus ID: 224841752

Defending Abduction

@article{Niiniluoto1999DefendingA,
  title={Defending Abduction},
  author={Ilkka Niiniluoto},
  journal={Philosophy of Science},
  year={1999},
  volume={66},
  pages={S436 - S451}
}

Ilkka Niiniluoto

Published 1999

Philosophy of Science

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction." He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause," and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis." Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of analysis), have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is… CONTINUE READING

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