abduction

Every time you hear a rustle in the bushes and think "animal" rather than "wind," you aren't using strict math or guaranteed logic. You are using a mental "shortcut" that is responsible for almost every scientific discovery in history. While deduction gives us certainty and induction gives us patterns, **abduction** gives us the "best guess" that allows us to function in an uncertain world. ## What is Abduction? Abduction, often called **Inference to the Best Explanation**, is the process of starting with a set of observations and seeking the most likely or simplest explanation for them. Unlike deduction (where the conclusion *must* be true if the premises are true), abductive conclusions are "defeasible," meaning they are smart guesses that might be proven wrong later. The American philosopher [Charles Sanders Peirce](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/), the father of pragmatism, argued that abduction is the only logical operation that actually introduces new ideas. He noticed that neither deduction nor induction could explain how a scientist comes up with a brand-new theory to test in the first place. > "The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before;