Abduction as Discovery and Pursuit

Abstract

The Scientific Revolution, which replaced ancient doctrines in the early modern age, convinced researchers that science is a systematic way of seeking new knowledge. For this reason, the method of scientific inquiry has to leave room for the heuristic generation of novel ideas. Many philosophers have sought a pattern of discovery in inductive reasoning, but the champions of the hypothetico-deductive model in science altogether denied the possibility of a logic of discovery (Sect. 5.1). Charles S. Peirce argued that “all the ideas of science come to it by way of abduction”, and described abduction as a kind of “insight”. In Sect. 5.2, we evaluate the potential of abduction as a logical reconstruction of the process of discovery by considering the ideas of Norwood Russell Hanson, Herbert Simon, and other “friends of discovery”. In Sect. 5.3, we discuss Larry Laudan’s alternative interpretation that abduction gives reasons for the pursuit of scientific hypotheses. In this sense, abduction gives before-trial criteria for identifying plausible or testworthy hypotheses. The GW-model is also related to the idea that inverse abductive reasoning is relevant for pragmatic human action. We give reasons to doubt that the pursuit and acceptance of hypotheses can always be sharply separated from each other.