What is Abduction?

Abduction is the term that the American Pragmatist philosopher, Semiotician, and logician C. S. Pierce coined for a unique form of logical reasoning. Pierce saw it as one of three logical forms of reasoning: Deduction, Induction, and Abduction.

Deduction moves from general principles to specific conclusions.

Induction moves from specific observations to general patterns.

Abduction seeks to identify the most plausible explanation for what has been observed via a process of inference that generates speculative hypotheses to account for puzzling phenomena.

There is nothing wrong with this, and all three can play important roles in creative practices. What we find to be problematic in the context of creativity and innovation is that abduction has gained significant attention from management consultants who claim that “innovation is abductive in nature”. This essentialist perspective suggests abduction is a type of silver bullet, where creative breakthroughs emerge from the novel mixing of unrelated concepts through abductive reasoning processes. The problem with such an approach is that we are back into the problematic paradigm of disembodied and disengaged ideation. Abduction can be carried out as a type of brainstorming, far removed from an experimentally engaged materially agential and emergent practice.

In practice, putting abductive reasoning at the imagined center of a creative practice is to fall back into the worst habits of Western dematerialized, individualistic, and idea-driven approaches to creativity and innovation.

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See also: Enaction, God Model, Ideation, Know-How