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Abduction

Abduction is a form of inference routinely used in everyday life that is also known as an inference to the best explanation. Abduction involves the selection of the best explanation for a particular event or phenomenon, given all the available evidence. There is always the chance that further evidence, discovered in the future, will undermine a past abduction in favor of some other explanation. Therefore, abduction is always provisional and available for revision in the face of new evidence.

Abduction is the inferential method used in murder mysteries, as well as many of the sciences. The inference typically proceeds as follows:

1) A singular event has occurred, e.g. someone dies.

2) Several possible explanations are offered. Is it accidental death, natural death or some form of homicide?

3) Given all the available evidence, the single competing explanation that best explains the evidence (covers it all, shows underlying connections, is coherent, agrees with other explanations we would accept, etc.) should be preferred.

Though it may be clear from the preceding discussion, abduction is typically competitive. In other words, a "best explanation" implies that at least one competitor is conceivable and therefore, at least in principle, available for comparison.

Abduction differs from induction in two primary ways: first, abduction can be concerned with singular events and the corresponding evidence, while induction is usually aimed at forming generalizations from a large number of token instances. Second, abduction has to often employ “unobservables” in its explanations (e.g. the murderer who is long gone), while induction generalizes over a class of potential observables based wholly on token observables.

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