Abstract

Henrike Jansen’s “The strategic formulation of abductive arguments in everyday reasoning”insightfully explores the terrain of abductive argumentation. The purpose of this note is to continuethe exploration along lines marked out by her paper. This further exploration proceeds in twostages. Section 2 of the paper addresses the nature of abductive inference by distinguishing twotypes of abduction, identifying some of abduction’s formal and nonformal properties, and relatingabduction to enthymematic inference. Section 3 focuses on some of Jansen’s examples, payingparticular attention to the distinction between abduction and argument from sign. Whereas Jansenmaintains that some arguments from sign are not abductive, the paper suggests an alternativeperspective from which arguments from sign can generally be viewed as one sort of abductiveinference.