Bibliography

The Proper Treatment of Hypotheses: a Preliminary Chapter, toward an Examination of Hume's Argument against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History

Any novice in logic may well be surprised at my calling a guess an inference. It is equally easy to define inference so as to exclude or include abduction. But all the objects of logical study have to be classifled; and it is found that there is no other good class in which to put abduction but that of inferences. Many logicians, however, leave it unclassed, a sort of logical supernumerary, as if its importance were too small to entitle it to any regular place. They evidently forget that neither deduction nor induction can ever add the smallest item to the data of perception; and, as we have already noticed, mere percepts do not constitute any knowledge applicable to any practical or theoretical use. All that makes knowledge applicable comes to us viâ abduction. Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

When a chicken first emerges from the shell, it does not try fifty random ways of appeasing its hunger, but within five minutes is picking up food, choosing as it picks, and picking what it aims to pick. That is not reasoning, because (it is not done deliberately; but in every respect but that), it is just like abductive inference.

A singular salad is abduction, whose chief elements are its groundlessness, its ubiquity, and its trustworthiness. [—]

Abduction is that kind of operation which suggests a statement in no wise contained in the data from which it sets out. There is a more familiar name for it than abduction; for it is neither more nor less than guessing. A given object presents an extraordinary combination of characters of which we should like to have an explanation. That there is any explanation of them is a pure assumption; and if there be, it is some one hidden fact which explains them; while there are, perhaps, a million other possible ways of explaining them, if they were not all unfortunately, false. [—] By its very definition abduction leads to a hypothesis which is entirely foreign to the data. To assert the truth of its conclusion ever so dubiously would be too much. There is no warrant for doing more than putting it as an interrogation. To do that would seem to be innocent; yet if the interrogation means anything, it means that the hypothesis is to be tested. Now testing by experiment is a very expensive business, involving great outlay of money, time, and energy; so that comparatively few hypotheses can be tested. Thus, even the admission of an abductive conclusion to the rank of an active interrogation is a concession not to be too lightly accorded.

Now, in an inquiry concerning a hypothesis in general, three distinct stages have to be recognized, these stages being governed by entirely different logical principles. The first stage consists in the invention, selection, and entertainment of the hypothesis. This I call the abduction.

… the classification of arguments is the chief business of the science of logic; so that every man who reasons (in the above sense) has necessarily a rudimentary science of logic, good or bad. The slang of the medieval universities called this his logica utens, - his “logic in possession”, - in contradistinction to logica docens, or the legitimate doctrine that is to be learned by study.

Every time a man really reasons, in that sense, he is clearly or obscurely conscious that his present inference belongs to a general class of cases in which an analogous conclusion might be drawn; and his approval of this reasoning consists in a belief that by acting on the same principle in all cases he will on the whole be advancing his knowledge more than by not drawing such conclusions. If this be true, as the reader’s self-observation may satisfy him that it is, a man cannot truly reason without having some notions about the classification of arguments. But the classification of arguments is the chief business of the science of logic; so that every man who reasons (in the above sense) has necessarily a rudimentary science of logic, good or bad. The slang of the medieval universities called this his logica utens, - his “logic in possession”, - in contradistinction to logica docens, or the legitimate doctrine that is to be learned by study.