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Hegel and Peircean Abduction

‘Abduction’ was the term Charles Sanders Peirce used in his later writings for a type of inference that he had earlier called ‘hypothesis’ and that is now commonly called ‘inference to the best explanation’. According to Peirce, abduction constituted, alongside induction, a distinct second form of nondemonstrative or probabilistic inference. Especially in his later work, Peirce conceived of abduction methodologically as a distinct step in scientific inquiry. By abduction the investigator postulated some possible non-apparent cause which would explain the existence of otherwise surprising phenomena. This postulation was then to be empirically tested by procedures drawing on deduction and induction. Peirce related his treatment of abduction to Aristotle’s syllogistic, mapping his three inference forms to Aristotle’s three syllogistic figures, but I suggest a more proximate genealogy. Both Peirce’s account of the interdependence of these three inference forms, and his mapping of them onto the syllogistic figures closely parallels Hegel’s treatment of non-demonstrative inference in the Science of Logic. Furthermore, both Peirce and Hegel regard their postulated third inference forms as somehow implicit within the structure of a particular type of perceptual judgment: aesthetic judgment. After laying out these similarities in the respective approaches of Peirce and Hegel to inference forms I suggest a common origin in their similar attempts to draw inferentialist conclusions from Kant’s transcendental logic.