Abstract
Here we challenge the orthodoxy according to which abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference. We start by providing a case study illustrating how abduction can justify a philosophical claim not justifiable by empirical evidence alone. While many grant abduction's epistemic value, nearly all assume that abductive justification is a posteriori, on grounds that our belief in abduction's epistemic value depends on empirical evidence about how the world contingently is (e.g., parsimonious, or such that more parsimonious theories better track truth). Contra this assumption, we argue, first, that our belief in abduction's epistemic value is not and could not be justified a posteriori, and second, that attention to the roles experience plays in abductive justification supports taking abduction to be an a priori mode of inference. We close by highlighting how our strategy for establishing the a priority of abduction positively contrasts with strategies in Bonjour (In defense of pure reason. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998), Swinburne (Epistemic justification. Claredon Press, Oxford, 2001), and Peacocke (The realm of reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) aiming to establish the a priority of certain ampliative modes of inference or abductive principles.
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Notes
Skeptics may nonetheless be interested in our reasons for thinking that the belief that abduction has epistemic value cannot be justified a posteriori.
For consideration of the principles at play in abduction see, e.g., Thagard (1978), Lipton (1991/2004), Beebe (2009) (esp. 609–611), and Mackonis (2013). For attempts to formalize some abductive principles see, e.g., McGrew (2003) and Shupbach and Sprenger (2011). For competing views on how abduction relates to other forms of inference see, e.g., Harman (1970), van Fraassen (2002), Weisberg (2009), and Henderson (2014).
Nor, pace Chalmers, can the requisite ampliative (read: abductive) resources be built into the concepts at issue, without multiplying concepts and introducing other problems (see Biggs and Wilson 2016, in progress).
This is not to suggest that metaphysicians have only recently characterized philosophy as proceeding by way of abduction. For example, as Fisher (2015) notes, Donald Williams’s method for doing metaphysics included “the weighing up of competing hypotheses against a scientific picture of the world, common sense, and a theory’s explanatory power and simplicity”, such that Williams “can be seen as an early defender of ‘inference to the best explanation’” as a method for doing metaphysics (6).
The claim that water and H2O are actually coextensive (and identical) has been widely (albeit not universally) accepted since Putnam (1962, 1975) and Kripke (1980). As has been observed (in, e.g., Weisberg 2005), however, chemists take H2O to be a genus that includes a series of distinct isomers among its species, some of which, they say (at least in ordinary contexts), are not water. Supposing, then, that we defer to chemists’ usage of ‘water’ to fix the content of our own uses, water is not coextensive with H2O. Granting Weisberg’s point, it remains that chemists (hence we) might maintain that water is identical with a particular isomer (or set of isomers) rather than merely spatiotemporally coincident with that isomer (or set of isomers), and run the argument to follow accordingly. For purposes of illustration we stick with the usual identity claim.
For example, a reductionist might aim to accommodate multiple realizability by taking the identity to involve a disjunctive lower-level type (a la Antony 1999) or by embracing species-level type-identities (a la Kim 1972); and a reductionist might reject seeming reference to higher-level types as presupposing an incorrect 'Picture Theory' of meaning (a la Heil 2003).
Ladyman (2007) worries that abduction cannot justify beliefs in metaphysical claims about real entities (e.g., water) because it takes intuitions as its explananda, and those intuitions may not reflect the nature of those entities. But typically the explananda at issue when using abduction to justify philosophical claims will also consist in empirical evidence—e.g., evidence that water and H2O are spatiotemporally coincident.
Depending on what counts as a ‘defense’, Douven may be overstating the case; see Sect. 5.
Swinburne (2001) and Peacocke (2004) also take broadly abductive applications of (something akin to) the principle of simplicity to be a priori justified. As prefigured, in Sect. 5 we highlight the main points of contrast of our account with these other approaches, as well as with Bonjour's (1998) account of induction as a priori justified.
Since some principles may be in tension, abduction as a general mode of inference also presumably encodes how these are to be ranked and weighted; we return to this issue at the end of this section.
We say 'perhaps' since one might deny that justification (or whatever epistemic good is seen as entering into the characterization of the epistemic value of a given mode of inference) hinges on truth, or likely truth, or any other metaphysical notions.
Thanks to a referee for this journal for raising this objection.
Tulodziecki (e.g., 2013) proposes a related method for empirically establishing the epistemic value of various “methodological practices”. We see her work as taking important steps toward identifying abductive principles, though not toward justifying them.
Thanks to a second referee for this journal for raising this objection.
See Reutlinger et al. (2015) for discussion.
For example, Lange (1993) attempts to navigate between the horns of the aforementioned dilemma by holding that for any genuine ceteris paribus law, some implicit rule (known to those who understand the law, or which is part of relevant scientific practice) guides justified decisions about whether an apparent failure of the law would count against the law or would rather fall under its ceteris paribus clause. On Lange’s proposal, even though a genuine ceteris paribus clause is not shorthand for a definite list of factors (and thus cannot be replaced by a definite list), it is not entirely unrestricted either. Earman and Roberts reject Lange’s proposal, in part, on grounds that it counterintuitively treats scientific laws as inference rules rather than empirical statements; but even if ceteris paribus claims cannot usually be treated as inference rules, there is no problem with treating Parsimony as such. (Lange further develops his account in, e.g., his 2000, 2009.).
See discussion of role (4) in Sect. 4.1.
The ‘can’ here and in discussion of the other roles experience might play in justifying a given belief is to be understood as ‘can, in the circumstances’. Belief in some claims (e.g., the four-colour theorem) admit of both a priori and a posteriori justification, but our question here is not whether a belief that was justified, e.g., by means of a computer proof, can be justified in some different, a priori, fashion, but rather the question of whether, given the specific means by which the belief was justified, the resulting justification is a priori.
One could think of this point as follows: experience playing a significant role in acquiring or learning how to use some mode of inference M suggests that M is not innate, but it does not suggest that belief in the epistemic value of M is not justified a priori. Correspondingly, the claim that experience must play an expansive role in our acquiring and learning how to deploy abduction, even if true, would pose no challenge to the claim that belief in the epistemic value of abduction is justified a priori. Plausibly, moreover, abduction is largely innate—we think that experience impacts abduction at most by tweaking how we weight and balance abductive principles, and we see this role for experience as relevantly analogous to experience filling in parameters in grammatical structures that are themselves innate, as per the principles and parameters approach to grammar (cf. Chomsky and Lasnik 1993; Chomsky 1995).
Although a mode of inference failing to be innate does not count against its a priority (in the relevant sense), its being innate may support its a priority. Kant (1781/1998) takes the fact that logic is constitutive of right thinking, at least for creatures like us, to provide broadly transcendental grounds for believing in its epistemic value. The innateness of abduction may suggest that it is constitutive of right thinking, no less than principles of logical inference are—indeed, abduction is arguably prior to principles of logical inference, insofar as abduction is the ultimate arbiter of disputes about logical principles and their applications. So, if Kant’s transcendental argument provides a priori justification for believing that logic has epistemic value, a parallel argument may provide a priori justification for believing that abduction has epistemic value. We find this further argument for the a priority of abduction to be appealing, but leave it for another time.
Given our topic, a relevant objection is one targeting the status of the epistemic value of the ampliative mode of inference at issue as a priori (as opposed to, e.g., one targeting the epistemic value of the mode of inference).
For purposes of discussion nothing turns on the specific formulation of the principle(s) of simplicity at issue.
Another potential concern for Bonjour’s argument for the a priority of induction is that this argument appeals to abduction, but he does not argue for the a priority of abduction and its principles (cf. Brueckner 2001, 7). Bonjour does suggest (in a footnote) that his argument for the a priority of induction might extend to abduction, saying “it is plausible that a justification of empirical theoretical [or abductive] reasoning would be at least approximately parallel to that for induction”, 201; but on the other hand, other of his remarks seem to cut against the a priority of abductive principles, as when he asks, “Why, after all, should it be thought … that the world is somehow more likely to be simple than complex?” (91).
It may moreover be worth noting that epistemic conservativism is unpopular: even Poston acknowledges that “the one thing in epistemology that everyone agrees about [is that] conservativism makes for bad epistemology” (20). That said, we do not see Poston’s conservativism as inconsistent with our position. Rather, what we reject is a position combining his conservativism with a particular positive conception of a priority.
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Thanks to David Alexander and Benj Hellie, and to two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Biggs, S., Wilson, J. The a priority of abduction. Philos Stud 174, 735–758 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0705-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0705-4