The Art of Abduction

by Igor Douven

Overview

A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning.

With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do.

Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262046701
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Igor Douven is CNRS Research Professor at the Sorbonne and the author of The Epistemology of Indicative Conditionals.

Table of Contents

List of Figures xii

List of Tables xiii

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xix

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Why You Should Want to Know About Abduction 1

1.2 Two Common Misconceptions 13

1.3 Overview 25

2 What Is Abduction? 29

2.1 Abduction in the Wild 30

2.2 Deduction, Induction, Abduction 34

2.3 Abduction and Underdetermination 55

3 The Psychology of Abduction 69

3.1 Into the Mud 69

3.2 The New Paradigm and Bayesian Rationality 71

3.3 Explanation and Belief Change 83

3.4 Just Noise? 89

3.5 Explanatory Reasoning and Accuracy 94

3.6 Good-Enough and Second-Best Explanations 96

3.7 Should Philosophers Care? 100

4 Facing the Challenges 103

4.1 The Dynamic Dutch Book Argument Revisited 104

4.2 Abductive Reasoning and Practical Interests 117

4.3 Abduction and Our Epistemic Goal 122

4.4 Summary 131

5 A Closer Look at Scoring 135

5.1 Standard Scoring Rules and Truthlikeness 135

5.2 Truthlikeness and Inaccuracy Minimization 143

5.3 Truthlikeness and Impropriety 146

6 The Ecological Rationality of Abduction 157

6.1 The Justification of Abduction 157

6.2 Previous Defenses of Abduction 158

6.3 Simulating Explanatory Reasoning 168

6.4 Concluding Remarks 184

7 The View from Social Epistemology 189

7.1 The Hegselmann-Krause Model and Beyond 192

7.2 Further Generalizing Group Learning 201

7.3 Evolutionary Computing and Optimal Group Learning 206

7.4 Optimal Group Learning in Action 214

7.5 The Upshot 217

8 An Abductive Response to the Skeptic 221

5.1 The Skeptical Challenge 221

8.2 Mooreans and Russellians against the Skeptic 224

8.3 Evidence, Inference, and Expert Functions 231

8.4 How to Resolve the Skepticism Debate? 243

Epilogue 253

Appendices

A Proof of Theorem 4.1 265

B Proof of Theorem 5.1 269

C Proof of Theorem 5.2 273

D Proof of Theorem 8.1 275

E Using Julia 279

References 301

Index 345

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book is a remarkable achievement combining formal rigor with experimental insight to justify and characterize human explanatory reasoning, or abduction, as Peirce called it. Such reasoning underpins much of everyday thinking as well as scientific inference and has become a key focus of much recent research into higher cognitive processes. I strongly recommend this authoritative and highly readable text to students and researchers alike.” 
—Mike Oaksford, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Science, Birkbeck College, University of London