Abduction: Some Conceptual Issues

We claim that abduction should primarily be studied from the perspective of its use. The big question “What is abduction?” is most often interpreted substantively and this distracts attention from the instrumental aspect of this form of reasoning. We propose to address the problem by asking “How abduction is used?”. As a result of our approach we see the fact that abduction needs to be construed as concerned with both generation and evaluation of hypotheses, and, furthermore, that abduction is a compound form of reasoning.