The Cognitive Science of Science by Thagard Paul

Author:Thagard, Paul [Thagard, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262300971
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-05-14T20:00:00+00:00

If logic means just “formal deductive logic,” then there is no logic of discovery. But N. R. Hanson (1958, 1965) argued for a broader conception of logic, which could be concerned not only with reasons for accepting a hypothesis but also with reasons for entertaining a hypothesis in the first place. He borrowed from Charles Peirce the idea of a kind of reasoning called “abduction” or “retroduction,” which involves the introduction of hypotheses to explain puzzling facts. By abduction Peirce meant “the first starting of a hypothesis and the entertaining of it, whether as a simple interrogation or with any degree of confidence” (Peirce, 1931–1958, vol. 6, p. 358). Unfortunately, Peirce was never able to say what the first starting of a hypothesis amounted to, aside from speculating that people have an instinct for guessing right. In multiple publications, Hanson only managed to say that a logic of discovery would include a study of the inferential moves from the recognition of an anomaly to the determination of which types of hypothesis might serve to explain the anomaly (Hanson, 1965, p. 65). Researchers in artificial intelligence have attempted to use formal logic to model abductive reasoning, but Thagard and Shelley (1997) describe numerous representational and computational shortcomings of these approaches, such as that explanation is often not a deductive relation.

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