Blue Jay writes:
Am I understanding it correctly?
That is also (from what I have read) how I understand it to work.
If I oversleep and go downstairs and see a cereal bowl in the sink then I can assume that my girlfriend has had breakfast.
I can do this because I have seen her eat breakfast from that type of bowl and seen her put the bowl in the sink.
Certainly, as with inductive reasoning, I could be wrong: a kidnapper might have taken my GF and had breakfast before leaving (and with some weird social conscience, put the bowl in the sink).
But that is very unlikely.
To think it was a kidnapper I would need to find signs that a kidnapper had been there.
But, until there is evidence of a kidnapper, I could be confident of my initial conclusion that my GF had eaten breakfast.
It is a difference in temporal direction.
Inductive reasoning 'predicts' the future based on a pattern we have seen.
Abductive reasoning 'predicts' the past based on a pattern we have seen.
"There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god." J. B. S. Haldane
™ Version 4.2
