Abstract
In general, Abduction refers to a logical operation of explanatory reasoning out of a specific set of premises, both discovery and hypothesis formulation. Abduction has also been referred to as various reasoning processes, such as hypothetical thinking, imagination, intuition, and guessing. Despite its variety of definitions, the leading intellectual reference for this entry is Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), logician and American philosopher, who first developed abductive reasoning ideas. We aim to understand what Abduction refers to and its impact on human knowledge construction, especially how it conceptualizes that humans are “made for” dealing with the possible. In this sense, an Abduction is a human form of coping with plausible possibilities and not with certainty or probability in logical terms. We will point out how to use the idea of Abduction in different ways and how it supports different ways of dealing “rationally” with the possible (be it as uncertainty, prediction, novelty, guessing, or intuition). We will discuss how this inclination toward dealing with uncertainty is not a process of truth-seeking but exploring possible worlds within the available information for each one in a given context (Ribeiro et al., Uncertainty in decision-making: an abductive perspective. Decision Support Systems 13(2):183–193, 1995). This type of reasoning has been explored in logics and scientific discovery, in learning contexts, and in ordinary life, to mention a few. With all of the above mentioned, we should understand Abduction as a critical process of human grasping of the possible.
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Fortes, G. (2021). Abduction. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_44-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_44-1
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