Abduction in Context

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

• Diagrammatic Reasoning
• Beast-machine Controversy
• Logic of Discovery
• Scientific Rationality
• Abduction vs Induction
• Abductive Reasoning
• Manipulative Abduction
• Magnani’s Views of Animal Abduction
• Pierce’s Views of Animal Abduction
• Abductive Instinct

• Humanities and Social Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea (Republic of)

  Woosuk Park

Policies and ethics