Abduction in Context

This book provides readers with a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, with emphasis 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's concept on animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid conception of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book then examines the problem of visual perception, as it has been tackled by the author, 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 extend then the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, the book demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all different individual scientific disciplines. All in all, the book is a comprehensive text, providing philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.