Abduction and economics: the contributions of Charles Peirce and Herbert Simon

Journal of Economic Methodology 22 (4):491-516 (2015)
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Abstract

A constantly changing social reality means economic theories, even if correct today, need to be constantly revised, updated, or abandoned. To maintain an up-to-date understanding of its subject matter, economists have to continuously assess their theories even those that appear to be empirically corroborated. Economics could gain from a method that describes and is capable of generating novel explanatory hypotheses. A pessimistic view on the existence of such a method was famously articulated by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. He wrote ‘there is no such a thing as a logical method of having ideas or a logical reconstruction of this process.’ Herbert Simon responded to Popper and argued the opposite, namely, that there is a model of discovery and its name is abduction. Simon acknowledges his debt to Charles Peirce – the first modern logician to explicitly formulate a theory of abduction – and explains that abduction is a model of discovery that works as a problem-solving heuristic encoded..

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
Inference to the Best Explanation.Peter Lipton - 1991 - London and New York: Routledge.
A Treatise on Probability.John Maynard Keynes - 1921 - London,: Macmillan & co..
The inference to the best explanation.Gilbert H. Harman - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):88-95.

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