FYI that’s what “abduction” means – whatever is needed to fill in the gaps that induction and deduction don’t cover. it’s rather vague and poorly specified though. it’s supposed to be some sort of inference to good explanations (mirror induction’s inference to generalizations of data), but it’s unclear on how you do it. you may be interested in reading about it.
in practice, abduction or not, what they do is use common sense, philosophical tradition, intuition, whatever they picked up from their culture, and bias instead of actually having a well-specified epistemology.
(Objectivism is notable b/c it actually has a lot of epistemology content instead of just people thinking they can recognize good arguments when they see them without needing to work out systematic intellectual methods relating to first principles. However, Rand assumed induction worked, and didn’t study it or talk about it much, so that part of her epistemology needs to be replaced with CR which, happily, accomplishes all the same things she wanted induction to accomplish, so this replacement isn’t problematic. LW, to its credit, also has a fair amount of epistemology material – e.g. various stuff about reason and bias – some of which is good. However LW hasn’t systematized things to philosophical first principles b/c it has a kinda anti-philosophy pro-math attitude, so philosophically they basically start in the middle and have some unquestioned premises which lead to some errors.)
FYI that’s what “abduction” means – whatever is needed to fill in the gaps that induction and deduction don’t cover. it’s rather vague and poorly specified though. it’s supposed to be some sort of inference to good explanations (mirror induction’s inference to generalizations of data), but it’s unclear on how you do it. you may be interested in reading about it.
in practice, abduction or not, what they do is use common sense, philosophical tradition, intuition, whatever they picked up from their culture, and bias instead of actually having a well-specified epistemology.
(Objectivism is notable b/c it actually has a lot of epistemology content instead of just people thinking they can recognize good arguments when they see them without needing to work out systematic intellectual methods relating to first principles. However, Rand assumed induction worked, and didn’t study it or talk about it much, so that part of her epistemology needs to be replaced with CR which, happily, accomplishes all the same things she wanted induction to accomplish, so this replacement isn’t problematic. LW, to its credit, also has a fair amount of epistemology material – e.g. various stuff about reason and bias – some of which is good. However LW hasn’t systematized things to philosophical first principles b/c it has a kinda anti-philosophy pro-math attitude, so philosophically they basically start in the middle and have some unquestioned premises which lead to some errors.)
Yes, I’m familiar with it. The concept comes from the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century.