Last but not least, I think about epistemology:
Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a method of reasoning in which one chooses the hypothesis that would, if true, best explain the relevant evidence. Abductive reasoning starts from a set of accepted facts and infers their most likely, or best, explanations.I do have a question. Isn't this usually considered as one of the steps of induction?
Not that I object to analyzing it as a separate step! But couldn't they have made up a new word to avoid confusion?
Philosophers love to distinguish
each little step
and they steal from normal English
with frightening pep.
They aren't the same. Let's put it like this:
ReplyDelete"Induction" is when an apeman mindlessly expects the Sun to go down today because that's what he's used to seeing.
"Abduction" is when Galileo looked for some explanation as to WHY the Sun keeps doing what it does, and then he selected Kepler's explanation as better than Ptolemy's.
Well put, as usual.
ReplyDeleteNo, no.
ReplyDeleteThe ape case or the child learning that flame burns is called eduction; it is only "inference" about the next occasion (J. S. Mills). Abduction is the generation of an hypothesis, the posing of one (C. S. Peirce). Induction could assist in that.
Stephen
Thank you, Stephen. I have the sense that there's a newer use of the term that Quee is referencing.
ReplyDeleteWhen I went sniffing around, the term seems to begin with C. S. Peirce, but then seems to have changed a bit more recently. See here:
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/lair/Projects/Abduction/abduction.html
That link was too long. Here's the tinyurl:
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/cd4nth
One of the easiest ways see how "abduction," so-called, i.e., "inference to the best explanation," works, is to watch the TV show called "House, M.D."
ReplyDeleteThis also helps people to see that it's truly how we actually do our scientific reasoning (as opposed to the way Descartes, Hume and some other philosophers have portrayed it).