Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete.
A medical diagnosis is an application of abductive reasoning: given this set of symptoms, what is the diagnosis that would best explain most of them? Likewise, when jurors hear evidence in a criminal case, they must consider whether the prosecution or the defense has the best explanation to cover all the points of evidence. While there may be no certainty about their verdict, since there may exist additional evidence that was not admitted in the case, they make their best guess based on what they know.
While cogent inductive reasoning requires that the evidence that might shed light on the subject be fairly complete, whether positive or negative, abductive reasoning is characterized by lack of completeness, either in the evidence, or in the explanation, or both. A patient may be unconscious or fail to report every symptom, for example, resulting in incomplete evidence, or a doctor may arrive at a diagnosis that fails to explain several of the symptoms. Still, he must reach the best diagnosis he can.
The abductive process can be creative, intuitive, even revolutionary. Einstein’s work, for example, was not just inductive and deductive, but involved a creative leap of imagination and visualization that scarcely seemed warranted by the mere observation of moving trains and falling elevators. In fact, so much of Einstein’s work was done as a “thought experiment” (for he never experimentally dropped elevators), that some of his peers discredited it as too fanciful. Nevertheless, he appears to have been right-until now his remarkable conclusions about space-time continue to be verified experientially.
‘Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion’,
W. Edwards Deming
The Art of Abduction by Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do.
Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.
The book is available, open access, at MIT Press Direct.
Table of Contents
- Preface
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0004 PDF - Acknowledgments
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0005 PDF - 1: Introduction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0006 PDF - 2: What Is Abduction?
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0007 PDF - 3: The Psychology of Abduction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0008 PDF - 4: Facing the Challenges
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0009 PDF - 5: A Closer Look at Scoring
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0010 PDF - 6: The Ecological Rationality of Abduction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0011 PDF - 7: The View from Social Epistemology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0012 PDF - 8: An Abductive Response to the Skeptic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0013 PDF - Epilogue
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14179.003.0014 PDF
The wisdom we mortals possess does not merely consist of remembering the past and apprehending the present, but in being able, through a knowledge of each, to anticipate the future, which grave men regard as the acme of human intelligence.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decamerone
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