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Induction versus Abduction

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A few days ago, Henry asked my in the comments section to a post about a Wesley Salmon quote whether our knowledge of the basic natural forces and laws -- gravity, inertia, etc. -- is at bottom inductive?

I said I didn't think so, and described the actual method of discovery as guess-and-test, or "abduction" in Charles Peirce's terminology. Today I'll go a little further into the distinction. The bottom line is that the "riddle of induction" shouldn't be all that worrisome because induction is seldom used.

Abduction is the name Peirce (pictured above) gave. Unfortunately, it is also a synonym for kidnapping, but that isn't the point at the moment. Abduction in the relevant sense is inference to the simplest explanation for a phenomenon.  It is often just a hunch or guess.

Our knowledge about the laws of nature arose through abductions. Benjamin Franklin abducted: that it would be more economical to believe that the static sparks that are often given off through friction, on the one hand, and bolts of lightning, on the other, are the same force operating on different scales than to believe that they are different forces. He tested this view by capturing lightning in a bottle. His tests were consistent with the guess, and the guess was over time widely accepted: a single-fluid theory of electricity.

It is difficult to see that as an instance of induction. Or deduction either. Which is why Peirce adopted a third term for it.

What is left of the "puzzle of induction" is a possible skepticism about there even being such things as forces or laws of nature. If we believe there is no such thing, that there is only so much cosmic weather, arbitrarily reliable regularity, then it is futile (one might argue) to speak of abduction either -- it will seem simply a way of looking for something that isn't there.

To this we can reply as good pragmatists: presuming there is something there to be found, and using abduction to find it, has worked for our species pretty well.

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