Abductive Reasoning In Science

I'm not sure I quite understand the distinction between inductive reasoning and abductive reasoning. From what I've read here, it sounds like abductive reasoning is sort of a special case of inductive reasoning.I've understood inductive reasoning to be like this:All crows I have seen are black
Therefore, all crows are blackAnd, from what I've understood here about abductive reasoning, it's similar, except that you also propose an explanation for why all crows are black.So, you're not just extrapolating from a pattern, but you're actually trying to explain the pattern you've seen.Am I understanding it correctly?

Hi, Straggler. You mean, like this: ?Your OP quote says abduction is equivalent to "affirming the consequent," but the above sounds more like "argument from analogy." It sounds to me like abduction is just the action of proposing a hypothesis for a set of observations.

Hi, Dr A. Oh, so my misunderstanding was more with what induction is: induction is not about explaining an observation at all, but about using observations to verify a theory, while abduction is about using a theory to explain observations.

Hi, RAZD. But, you stopped a step early: the inductive step is to then conclude that P is always true, even in cases where you haven't yet made any observations. Of course, inductive conclusions step beyond the empirical evidence, so they are always treated as tentative. That's the whole reason for the principle of tentativity.-----AbE: Also, I note that Firefox still doesn't like "consilience," even if you spell it right. Edited by Blue Jay, : marked addition

Hi, Dr A. That doesn't sound right to me. Is there a way to arrive at a general law without inductive reasoning?