Abductive Reasoning In Science

I'd like to get at what you mean by "valid." Logically valid?It's clear simply from the description that abduction is logically fallacious. But it's clear from history and the existence of technology that scientific abduction produces useful, accurate information about the natural world.I would go so far to suggest that if scientific abduction is illogical, that exposes a problem with logic, not with scientific abduction. Logic has a pretty mixed history of producing accurate knowledge. For instance, Aristotlian physics.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I grant that it is a mode of reasoning, but I'm not seeing how it's a mode of logical reasoning. By definition, the process of abduction is committing the formal fallacy of ad hoc, ergo propter hoc.How can a valid mode of logical reasoning be a fallacy? By "logical" do you just mean "rational"? What I mean by "logical" is "valid within formal logic."

I'm not prepared to have that discussion with you.

If I can avoid a "what do words mean" type of conversation by saying so, then let me try to clarify - I guess what I'm saying is that it's difficult to reconcile formal logic with empiricism or abduction. Or, for that matter, induction. Many philosophers of science have construed this as a problem with empiricism and abduction - Hume's inductive fallacy, for instance. Other philosophers, for instance the apparent authors of the Wikipedia article on abduction, expand the scope of logic to envelop modes of reasoning beyond the formal deductive.I choose to construe the issue as being a problem with logic, one that largely relegates logic to the status of an amusing parlor game as opposed to a useful tool for grappling with the world. That may be, because I like to keep "valid" distinct from "true." A proposition in logic is valid when it descends from premises by means of logical transformations that preserve truth values. A proposition in logic is true when it descends validly from premises that are true. Most of the time. Of course, per Godel, under some circumstances a proposition can be valid but not true.I guess what I'm getting at is, I'm much less interested in whether abductive reasoning is logically valid, since it is useful and true, which is more important.

Does anybody not from the "disagree just to be disagreeable" crowd have anything to say?