Abstract
The present chapter aims at exploring and clarifying the contributions made from the ranks of argumentation theorists to account for abductive-type forms of offering reasons for a certain content, what amounts to focusing on abductive arguments instead of abductive reasoning. Argumentation theory is an interdisciplinary field, mainly gathering philosophers, linguists, communication scholars, rhetoricians, educators, and other experts dedicated to the study of argumentative practices, i.e., communicative, interactive practices of asking for, giving, and examining reasons in variously situated and regulated contexts and settings. This chapter includes an Introduction, in which the general approach and its basic assumptions are identified and explored; section “Argumentative Approaches to Abduction” revises different proposals for the argumentative analysis of abductive arguments, some of which are inherently dialogical, while others make use of the methodology of argumentation schemes and critical questions; section “Philosophical Models of Explanation” explores theoretical relations between argumentative approaches to abduction and pragmatic approaches to explanation; section “The Inferencist Versus Reasonist Distinction and IBE” presents a conceptual distinction between reasonist and inferencist accounts of abductive argumentative schemes that helps questioning the idea of a prefixed inferencist model for the selection of the best available explanation; and section “Abduction and Selection of Hypotheses in Argumentative Scientific Practice” explores the application of some of the previous ideas to the analysis of one concrete example of abductive argumentative practice in a scientific setting. A concluding section summarizes the main features of reason-giving-based accounts of abduction.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been made possible by funds provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through Research Project PGC-2018-095941B-100, “Argumentative Practices and the Pragmatics of Reasons.”
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Olmos, P. (2022). Reason-Giving-Based Accounts of Abduction. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_70-1
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