Abductive Reasoning
The Basic Idea
The scientific method begins with a hypothesis—an educated guess. After making some sort of observation about the world, scientists come up with a potential explanation, which they put to the test using cleverly-designed experiments. But until there’s data to back them up, hypotheses are just stabs in the dark: they might be accurate, but they also might not be.
The generation of hypotheses relies on a particular kind of logical inference, known as abductive reasoning, abduction, “inference to the best explanation,” or, simply, “hypothesis.” Alongside its sisters, deductive (“top-down”) reasoning and inductive (“bottom-up”) reasoning, abductive reasoning is a core component of the methodology of science, and although it cannot itself be the basis for any sort of conclusions about the world, it represents the crucial first step towards that end.
Abduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea..
- Charles Peirce1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
