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In this paper I will interpret two ways in which Pierce tried to define abduction. The first is Pierce's attempt to find a form of syllogism that would represent abduction. In his last attempts to suggest a syllogism, I show that its conclusion is equivalent to a doubly negated predicate. Since Pierce then considers its corresponding positive predicate, this kind of change of the predicate is called the Pierce principle, which is similar, but weaker than Markov's. The second way is to provide definitions of abduction as a process of construction of an entire theory rather than as the construction of a single law. These definitions are compared with the model of organization of a scientific theory that my previous works recognized through a comparative analysis of many important scientific theories whose aim is to discover a solution of a fundamental problem, how investigate an unknown or ill-defined entity. Each of these theories proceeds by means of reasoning whose conclusion is a doubly negated predicate, which is then changed by the author into the corresponding affirmative predicate, which in turn takes on the role of a hypothesis from which all possible consequences are deduced and then verified experimentally. I will show that this change in the predicate is regulated by the principle of sufficient reason, which is stronger than Peirce's principle. In conclusion, Peirce's attempts to define abduction proved to be intuitive, but imprecise, illustrations of the process of construction of a theory belonging to a particular class of scientific theories making use of non-classical logic.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_18

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