Power laws & abductive research
Dave Snowden,
Cognitive Edge,
Aug 09, 2010
Nice post on types of inference and in particular about abduction. Abduction is also known as 'inference to the best explanation'. It's what we have to do with respect to complex phenomena; it is most tentative of the three inferential strategies and gives us, as Dave Snowden says, anticipation rather than prediction. That doesn't mean it is without evaluative standards; I discuss those here, in my discussion of the logical fallacies. I like the presentation of the coherence requirement in this post. "He rightly headed the slide Complements, not alternatives. Abductive techniques are in effect means of generating coherent hypotheses under conditions of uncertainty. The coherence word is key here, just because we don't know everything it doesn't mean that all ideas have equal value."
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