Dear all,
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a really good entry on "abduction"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/
And just as Salu points out, abduction in itself might not be of so much interest when trying to understand design practices with all its twists. Abduction is one of the ways in which humans make inferences, in all our more or less institutionalized practices. But, framing/reframing, as Salu calls it, tells us more about how designers make it possible to reason, to make inferences, to explain, to engage, to make people want to change, etc.
With PhDs it is fruitful not only to discuss the different ways of making inferences, but also some of the symbolic value with the different kinds of inference-making. Discussions should circle around what the choices of inference-making says about the way 1) they as individuals view how knowledge is produced and what kind of knowledge that is heralded and 2) a scientific field views knowledge production and what knowledge is. I'm sure Don have experiences and examples of this from cognitive science research, with misunderstandings and productive moments, that emanated from differences in such views.
Sometimes I also find it helpful to students, if they start out with thinking of abductive inference as the one with few restrictions, and inductive and deductive inference as special cases, with more restrictions. This is not entirely true, but a lot of students believes (after having been taught that for many years) that deduction is the mother of all inference-making (which is not entirely true either). And it may be difficult, for some students, to break free from the deductive hegemony, without a bit of help.
all the best
/Stefan
-------
Stefan Holmlid, @shlmld
Associate Professor, Interaction & Service Design
Department of Computer & Information Science
Linköping University
Phone +46 13 28 5633
Please visit us at www.ida.liu.se/~ixs
-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Ylirisku Salu
Sent: den 11 februari 2015 06:18
Subject: Abduction and reframing
/.../
A couple of years ago I did some work to address abduction, and I never published as my attention was taken into the notion of ‘framing’. I came to believe that the theoretical discussion about abduction helped me little in understanding how design thinking actually works.
/.../
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|