List, Another point that is often overlooked in discussions of inference to the best explanation, which I agree is not the same as abduction, though I think abduction is more restrictive than just inference to any hypothesis from which the evidence might be inferred, is that the best explanation need not be a good explanation, so we need more than inference to the best explanation to carry out inquiry responsibly. There are no magic rules for finding the truth (or “anything goes” as Feyerabend would say in his typically provocative manner).
John Collier Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Clark Goble [mailto:cl...@lextek.com] Sent: Friday, 04 March 2016 12:35 AM To: Peirce List Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Abduction, Deduction, Induction : Analogy, Inquiry On Mar 3, 2016, at 3:25 PM, Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net<mailto:jawb...@att.net>> wrote: Let me just say again that abduction is not “inference to the best explanation”. That gloss derives from a later attempt to rationalize Peirce's idea and it has led to a whole literature of misconception. Abduction is more like “inference to any explanation” — or maybe adapting Kant's phrase, “conceiving a concept that reduces a manifold to a unity”. The most difficult part of its labor is delivering a term, very often new or unnoticed, that can serve as a middle term in grasping the structure of an object domain. I fully agree and many of his quotations make clear it’s not inference to the best explanation. However we should admit that in some places he sure seems to get close to that idea. Even if it doesn’t appear to be workable. I’d argue that even when he appears to be talking about best explanation he’s much more after the fact our guesses are so often quite good. (Although I’d have to go through all the quotes to be sure that’s fair to the texts)
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