Abducing Abduction

This book offers the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction, tracing its evolution across five distinct periods from 1864 to 1914. It reconstructs Peirce’s shifting treatment of hypothesis—from its early separation from induction, to its redefinition as an “induction of characters,” its association with Aristotle’s apagoge , and its eventual reformulation as “retroduction.” Bridging historical scholarship and logical analysis, it clarifies abduction’s justification, validity, and its formal, epistemic, and methodological characteristics that distinguish it from Peircean induction and deduction, while also analyzing the place of pragmatism within these inferential forms. It further examines how Peirce’s ideas have been interpreted and adapted in contemporary debates in philosophy of science, logic, and cognitive science, including inference to the best explanation, artificial intelligence, practical logic, and eco-cognitive approaches. The concluding chapter introduces the Agentive Semiotics framework, showing how Peirce’s insights illuminate abduction as a dynamic, agent-driven process for restoring cognitive manageability when the available and activated information becomes disrupted.