[PEN-L:11413] re: adduction

["James Michael Craven" <CRAVJM@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote, > > >And why can't adduction play a role?
(Adduction,
> >often spelled "abduction" (which sounds more fun), refers to figuring out
> >"answers to specific questions so that a satisfactory explanatory 'fit' is
> >obtained" using both induction and deduction, according to David Hackett
> >Fischer, quoted in Joshua Goldstein, LONG CYCLES: PROSPERITY AND WAR IN THE
> >MODERN AGE, p. 179.)
>
> Perhaps abduction has gotten a bad name from its association with
> kidnappers. Q-methodology is described by its proponents as an abductory
> method. I doing a q-study right now (attitudes to work time and the
> millennium), so I suppose I could say I'm an abductor. But whatever happened
> to plain old duction? I suspect that a lot of the mental landscape is held
> together by sheer duction in the same way that much of the pre-post-modern
> objective world was held together by duct tape. Who ever heard of induct
> tape, deduct tape or abduct tape, anyway?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom Walker
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Response (Jim C)

A la Blaug's discussion in "The Methodology of Economics" the
distinction between "induction" and "adduction" is made in reference
to Hume's "fallacy of induction"(I have this random and wide sample
of swans and every swan in the sample is white "therefore" all swans
are white; one black swan destroys the generalization and "therefore"
the general cannot be "proven" from the particular in the same sense
that the particular can be tautologically "proven" from general
assumptions like A=B, B=C ergo A=C). The suggestion then is that
adduction refers to provisional "support" for generalizations from
particular data, facts etc--provisional in the sense that
falsification may loom over the horizon with the finding of a "black"
swan.

                               Jim Craven

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