Evidence · Case 07 · Philosophy
Charles Sanders Peirce, origin of the concept
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Peirce, an American logician working in the last third of the 1800s, first named and described this pattern, using the terms abduction and retroduction. He treated it as a distinct third kind of inference alongside deduction and induction, the step by which we arrive at a plausible explanatory hypothesis in the first place.
Sources
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard University Press, 1931 to 1958) - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Abduction,” supplement on Peirce,
Objections & responses
- Peirce’s abduction is about generating hypotheses, not confirming them. He would have said the resurrection hypothesis is worth testing, not that it has been established.
A fair distinction. Peirce’s abduction is the logic of hypothesis formation, and the modern inference to the best explanation (Harman, Lipton) extends it to justification. The arguments on this site use the modern form. Peirce is cited for pedigree, and his own view of the justificatory step was more cautious than the modern one, which is worth knowing when someone invokes his name.