[spsp-members] Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation Online Book Launch
Kenneth Aizawa via spsp-members
announce an online book launch for Ken Aizawa’s *Compositional Abduction
and Scientific Interpretation*. The event will take place May 18, 2026 from
9:00 am – 12:00 pm EST. The event will feature the historians and
philosophers of science Uljana Feest, (Universität Hannover), Gualtiero
Piccinini (University of Missouri, Columbia), and Samuel Schindler (Aarhus
University).
Each commentator will offer a 30 minute commentary with a 15 minute
response from Aizawa followed by 15 minutes of open Q&A. Anyone who would
like to attend should email Ken Aizawa at ken.a...@gmail.com to be
included on the Zoom link invitation.
*Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation *is here
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compositional-abduction-and-scientific-interpretation/5295E3347B5287EC137752BABC337AC7>
freely available open access from Cambridge University Press.
For scheduling information, when it becomes available, see here
<https://sites.google.com/d/1gjSZwSBYgLjh3XMhxNxm9Wu-HswJtQTv/p/1o16T_tLsvzzIQ2FtHeNTYh-OlAqcEBPr/edit>
.
About the book
Abductive reasoning is a form of inference that infers some hypothesis
because of what that hypothesis explains. Unlike deductive reasoning, it
yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. The
theory of compositional abduction developed in this book provides a novel
theory of confirmation. Kenneth Aizawa uses case studies to analyse how
scientists interpret the results of experiments to support compositional
hypotheses (i.e. hypotheses about what things are composed of) and suggests
that they use a kind of abduction. His theory is offered as an alternative
account of scientific reasoning that the logical empiricists would have
interpreted as hypothetico-deductive confirmation. It is also an
alternative to the Peircean interpretation of the role of abduction in
science. It will be of interest to philosophers of science, especially
those working on hypothetico-deductive confirmation, Peirce’s view of
abduction, inference to the best explanation, and the New Mechanism.
--
Kenneth Aizawa
Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University, Newark
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