Abducing Abduction

This book offers the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Peirce's theory of abduction, tracing its evolution across five distinct periods from 1864 to 1914. It reconstructs Peirce's shifting treatment of hypothesisfrom its early separation from induction, to its redefinition as an induction of characters, its association with Aristotle's apagoge , and its eventual reformulation as retroduction. Bridging historical scholarship and logical analysis, it clarifies abduction's justification, validity, and its formal, epistemic, and methodological characteristics that distinguish it from Peircean induction and deduction, while also analyzing the place of pragmatism within these inferential forms. It further examines how Peirce's ideas have been interpreted and adapted in contemporary debates in philosophy of science, logic, and cognitive science, including inference to the best explanation, artificial intelligence, practical logic, and eco-cognitive approaches. The concluding chapter introduces the Agentive Semiotics framework, showing how Peirce's insights illuminate abduction as a dynamic, agent-driven process for restoring cognitive manageability when the available and activated information becomes disrupted.

Analyzes the structure, epistemic and methodological role of Peirce's Standard Schema of Abduction Discusses the reception of Peirce's ideas in philosophy of science, AI, and logic Introduces a new framework (Agentive Semiotics) for understanding Abduction and Induction

Inhalt

Introduction.- How to make abduction clear.- Questions concerning the place of abduction and Peirce's logic.