On Sunday, I said something about Stefan Molyneux's new book. He purports to discuss the art of argument, and runs through certain basics about logic but ... punts on the Peircean principle of abduction. I'll address Stefan directly hereafter. The rest of you may listen in. --------------------------- This is how you define abduction: "There is another category [of inference] called abductive reasoning that draws a tentative hypothesis from disparate data, but which is related to some sort of testable hypothesis, rather than the reaching of a specific conclusion." Um ... no. You seem to have simply thrown together some words here without thinking about why or whether they even make any sense together. An abduction won't get you to a certain or dogmatic conclusion, but it doesn't follow that the conclusion must fail to be "specific." Also, what does it mean for data to be "disparate," why would the data on which an abduction be bas...