Unification and confirmation

According to the traditional requirement, formulated by William Whewell in his account of the “consilience of inductions” in 1840, a scientific hypothesis should have unifying power in the sense that it explains and predicts several mutually independent phenomena. Variants of this notion of consilience or unification include deductive, inductive, and approximate systematization. Inference from surprising phenomena to their theoretical explanations was called abduction by Charles Peirce. As a unifying theory is independently testable by new kinds of phenomena, it should also receive confirmation from its empirical success. The study of the prospects of probabilistic Bayesianism to motivate this kind of criterion for abductive confirmation is shown to lead to two quite distinct conceptions of unification.; De acuerdo con un requisito tradicional, formulado por William Whewell en su explicación de la "consiliencia de las inducciones" en 1840, una hipótesis científica debería tener poder unificador, en el sentido de que explique y prediga varios fenómenos mutuamente independientes. Las variantes de esta noción de consiliencia o unificación incluyen la sistematización deductiva, inductiva y aproximada. Charles Peirce llamó abducción a la inferencia que va de fenómenos sorprendentes hasta sus explicaciones teóricas. Puesto que una teoría unificadora puede contrastarse independientemente a partir de nuevas clases de fenómenos, también debería recibir confirmación a partir de su éxito empírico. Se muestra que el estudio de las perspectivas del bayesianismo probabilístico para motivar este tipo de criterio para la confirmación abductiva conduce a dos concepciones distintas de la unificación, vinculación (linking up) y anulación (screening off), y en ambos casos puede observarse que la teoría unificadora recibe apoyo probabilístico a partir de fenómenos empíricos

Is abduction ignorance-preserving? Conventions, models and fictions in science

Abduction is a procedure in which something that lacks classical explanatory epistemic virtue can be accepted because it has virtue of another kind: Gabbay and Woods (2005, The Reach of Abduction) contend (GW-model) that abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character. From this perspective abductive reasoning is a response to an ignorance-problem; through abduction the basic ignorance—that does not have to be considered a total ‘ignorance’—is neither solved nor left intact. Abductive reasoning is an ignorance-preserving accommodation of the problem at hand. Is abduction really ignorance-preserving? To better answer this question I will take advantage of my eco-cognitive model (EC-model) of abduction and of three examples taken from the areas of both philosophy and epistemology. It will be illustrated that through abduction, knowledge can be enhanced, even when abduction is not considered an inference to the best explanation (IBE) in the classical sense of the expression, i.e. an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase, or an inductive phase, as Peirce called it. (1) Peirce provides various justifications of the knowledge enhancing role of abduction, even when abduction is not considered an IBE in the classical sense of the expression, i.e. an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase, or inductive phase. These justifications basically resort to the conceptual exploitation of evolutionary and metaphysical ideas, which clearly show that abduction is constitutively akin to truth, even if certainly always ignorance-preserving or mitigating in the sense that the ‘absolute truth’ is never reached through abduction; (2) in empirical science abducing conventions favours and increases knowledge even if these hypotheses remain evidentially inert—at least in the sense that it is not possible to empirically falsify them. Consequently abduced conventions are evidentially inert but knowledge enhancing at the rational level of science; (3) in science we do not have to confuse the process of abducing models with the process of abducing fictions: the recent epistemological conundrum concerning fictionalism presents to us the epistemic situation in which the models abduced by scientists reveal themselves not to be ‘airy nothings’ at all, and certainly different in their gnoseological status from literary fictions. Scientific models instead play fundamental ‘rational’ knowledge enhancing roles: in a static perspective (e.g. when inserted in a textbook) scientific models can appear fictional to the epistemologist, but their fictional character disappears if a dynamic perspective is adopted. Abduction in scientific model-based reasoning is not a suspicious process of guessing fictions