Tom, list,
Your claim, if true, would come as a big surprise to Peirce and
everybody who has seriously studied abductive inference in particular
and inference in general.
By an informal transference of sense, "abduction" can refer to the
abductive conclusion, likewise as "deduction" can refer to the deductive
conclusion, and "induction" to the inductive conclusion, or, if you
like, to the abductive, deductive, or inductive "understanding that
results from the activity".
But, in stricter usage, it refers to the inference as a whole. This is a
question of the meanings of technical terms. The meanings are motivated
in part by economy of inquiry. In the Peircean tradition at least, it's
considered more valuable to have a term for _/inference to an
explanation/_ than for _/true explanatory conclusion/_. The overall
perspective is that of fallibilistic logic of discovery.
There is no requirement for an inference's classification as abductive
(or as inductive or as deductive or, in any tradition of logic, as an
inference at all) that it "prove successful" - i.e., conclude in a
truth. An abductive inference - i.e., a guess, conjecture, or surmise at
explanation - is justified at the level of critique of arguments by its
plausibly explaining a phenomenon. It is justified at the methodeutical
(i.e., methodological) level by its promise of expediting the inquiry
process, first of all by its testability. Abductive inferences conclude
in falsehoods oftener than not. Deduction automatically preserves truth
— i.e., its conclusion is true if the premisses are true; but deduction
does not automatically conclude in a truth, since some explicit or
implicit premiss in it may be false. And so on.
Best, Ben
On 5/4/2016 10:46 AM, Thomas wrote:
List ~
* The surprising fact, C, is observed.
* But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
* Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
All of that I agree with. But it describes the activity that results
in abduction. It is not a logical abduction. Abduction is the
understanding that results from the activity -- if the guess proves
successful.
Regards,
Tom Wyrick
On May 3, 2016, at 3:35 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote
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