This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...) author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce’s own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking. (shrink)

We examine Charles S. Peirce's mature views on the logic of science, especially as contained in his later and still mostly unpublished writings. We focus on two main issues. The first concerns Peirce's late conception of retroduction. Peirce conceived inquiry as performed in three stages, which correspond to three classes of inferences: abduction or retroduction, deduction, and induction. The question of the logical form of retroduction, of its logical justification, and of its methodology stands out as the three major threads (...) in his later writings. The other issue concerns the second stage of scientific inquiry, deduction. According to Peirce's later formulation, deduction is divided not only into two kinds but also into two sub-stages: logical analysis and mathematical reasoning, where the latter is either corollarial or theorematic. Save for the inductive stage, which we do not address here, these points cover the essentials of Peirce's latest thinking on the l.. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to try and make one’s ideas clearer about such concepts as “logic,” “psychology,” “mind,” “normativity,” rationality,” as they were conceived by Peirce, in order to elucidate his genuine position as far as the relationship between logic and pychology is concerned, whether he was or was not a straightforward “anti psychologist” in logic, and from such analyses, to make some suggestions about the contemporary relevance of Peirce’s original views on such isues.

Material Engagement Theory is currently driving a conceptual change in the archaeology of mind. Drawing upon the dictates of enactivism and active externalism, it specifically calls for a radical reconceptualization of mind and material culture. Unpersuaded by the common assumption that cognition is brain-bound, Malafouris argues in favour of a process ontology that situates thinking in action. In granting ontological primacy to material engagement, MET seeks to illuminate the emergence of human ways of thinking through the practical effects of the (...) material world. Considering that this is a characteristic example of a pragmatic take on cognition, this contemporary theoretical platform appears to share a lot with pragmatism. As of late, scholars working at the intersection of philosophy, semiotics, and cognitive science have made important steps towards the rapprochement between pragmatism and externalism. Looking to contribute to this growing corpus of work, the present paper focuses on MET’s relation to the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead. Having elsewhere recognized the overlap and complementarity between Malafouris’ and Peirce’s theories in particular, I developed a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics that is suitably geared to trace the nature, emergence, and evolution of material signs. Therefore, besides noting some obvious historical connections, I hereby aim to establish the theoretical backdrop upon which this composite theory is supposed to function, while also exploring new potential avenues. Given that this cognitive semiotic framework can be seen as a pragmatic extension of Malafouris’ enactivist approach to archaeology, the current paper delves into MET’s theoretical underpinnings, seeking to complement its working hypotheses and concepts with philosophical notions and ideas advanced long ago. This synthesis ultimately concludes with a call for the reconceptualization of ‘representation’ as a heuristic concept. (shrink)

Presumption is often discussed in law, less often in epistemology. Is it an attitude? If so where can we locate it within the taxonomy of epistemic attitudes? Is it a kind of belief, a judgment, an assumption or a supposition? Or is it a species of inference? There are two basic models of presumption: judgmental, as a kind of judgment, and legal, taken from the use of presumptions in law. The legal model suggests that presumption is a practical inference, whereas (...) the judgmental model suggests that presumption is an epistemic attitude. I argue that presumption is neither a practical inference nor a merely epistemic attitude: it involves both, within the category of what we may call the inquiring attitudes. (shrink)