[PHILOS-L] Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation Online Book Launch
Kenneth Aizawa
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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 freely available open access from Cambridge University Press.
For scheduling information, when it becomes available, see here.
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.
Department of Philosophy
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