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Dear Terry, yes, a guess, but also a taking away. That is, one can make another guess within a cycle of induction/deduction. Which will take us into the areas of grounded theory and most forms of literary analysis (read the book, think about it, make a guess, read the book again, take away the first guess, guess again based on the first guess and the second reading, read the book etc.) As Wiki tells us: The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced /*p*rs/ like "purse") (1839*1914) introduced abduction into modern logic. Over the years he called such inference hypothesis, abduction, presumption, and retroduction. He considered it a topic in logic as a normative field in philosophy, not in purely formal or mathematical logic, and eventually as a topic also in economics of research. The retroduction covers this sense of taking away the starting point and reinforces the AB part of ab-duction. I take Peirce's approach to be similar to that of Aristotle, in the Rhetoric. That is, Peirce is attempting to account for how we all go about the business of reasoning and he comes up with abduction; Aristotle is attempting to account for how we mostly go about arguing and he comes up with the the Enthymeme (a syllogism minus one of its arguments because the audience assumes the missing bit). Enthymeme means: to have in the mind. So I guess they were both being pragmatists? cheers keith >>>>>>>>> Hi Fil, Andy and all, Peirce was perhaps the main original proponent and definer of abduction. His definition of 'abduction' was 'to guess' - nothing more complex. This suggests that the value of the concept of abduction is limited in design research unless one creates a whole lot more theory sophistication about the activity of 'making a guess'. In which case, using the term (and concept of) 'abduction' (with its limited meaning) isn't that helpful. Best wishes, Terry