Re: Beyond Experiment • Scott Church

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 perhaps 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, able to serve as a middle term in grasping the structure of an object domain.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)