Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference?

Peirce’s conception of abduction has many puzzling features. Some of these puzzles follow from the fact that Peirce developed his theory of abduction throughout his long career, and changed his views in some important respects. This development should then be taken into account when his multi-faceted conception of abduction is interpreted. One important change was that, in his later writings, a guessing instinct, or an instinct for finding good hypotheses, was an important aspect of abduction, indeed, a central element that made the originary character of abduction understandable. Earlier, he had rejected this role explicitly. The strong appeal to instinct raises, however, a fundamental problem for his later view. It leads to a seemingly paradoxical view that new ideas and hypotheses are products of an instinct (or an insight), and products of an inference at the same time (Frankfurt 1958: 594; see also Fann 1970: 35; Anderson 1987: 32, 35; Roth 1988; Brogaard 1999; Burton 2000). Can abduction be, at the same time, a form of reasoning and have its basis so clearly in instinct? Usually it is thought that new ideas are products of an imaginative faculty of human beings, which is a matter of psychology (or maybe sociology), or contrary-wise, of a rational or rule-following procedure, which would mean that one could develop some sort of a logic of discovery; but not these two at the same time or with the same model. If abduction relies on instinct, it is not a form of reasoning, and if it is a form of reasoning, it does not rely on instinct. In this article, I examine how it is interpreted that Peirce succeeded in combining instinct and inference; and, more generally, how to see the relationship between these two. I first present, briefly, some basic phases of Peirce’s conception of abduction, and di¤ering characterizations that may be found for instinct in Peirce’s writings. Then I will discuss other interpeters’ accounts of how Peirce combines instinct and inference. Finally I present my own interpretation of this relationship and give my own assessment. To foreshadow, I maintain that it is beneficial to make a clear distinction between abductive inference and abductive instinct, and