Abduction

Abduction is the logic used to construct descriptions and explanations that are grounded in the everyday activities of, as well as in the language and meanings used by, social actors. Abduction refers to the process of moving from the way social actors describe their way of life to technical, social scientific descriptions of that social life. It has two stages: (a) describing these activities and meanings and (b) deriving categories and concepts that can form the basis of an understanding or an explanation of the problem at hand. Abduction is associated with interpretivism.

The logic of abduction is used to discover why people do what they do by uncovering largely tacit, mutual knowledge and the symbolic meanings, motives, and rules that provide the orientations for their actions. Mutual knowledge is background knowledge that is largely unarticulated, constantly used and modified by social actors as they interact with each other, and produced and reproduced by them in the course of their lives together. It is the everyday beliefs and practices—the mundane and taken for granted—that have to be grasped and articulated by the social researcher to provide an understanding of these actions.

The concept of abduction has had limited use in philosophy and social science. Two writers, the philosopher C. S. Peirce (1931, 1934) and the sociologist David Willer (1967), have used it but with different meanings to that presented here; the latter is derived from Blaikie (1993). Although not using the concept of abduction, the logic was devised by Alfred Schütz (1963) and used by Jack Douglas, John Rex, and, particularly, Anthony Giddens (1976) (for a review of these writers, see Blaikie, 1993, pp. 163–168, 176–193).

What Schütz, Douglas, Rex, and Giddens have in common is their belief that social science accounts of the social world must be derived, at least initially, from the accounts that social actors can give of the aspect of their world of interest to the social scientist. They differ, however, in what is done with these accounts. Some argue that reporting everyday accounts is all that is possible or necessary to understand social life. Others are prepared to turn these accounts into social scientific descriptions of the way of life of a particular social group (community or society), but they insist on keeping these descriptions tied closely to social actors' language. Such descriptions lend themselves to two other possibilities. The first is to bring some existing theory or perspective to bear on them, thus providing a social scientific interpretation or critique of that way of life. The second is to generate some kind of explanation using as ingredients the ideal types that are derived from everyday accounts. There are disagreements on both of these latter possibilities—in the first case, about whether criticism of another way of life is legitimate and, in the second case, about what else can or should be added to the everyday account to form a theory.

Interpretive social scientists use some version of abduction with a variety of research methods. However, they rarely articulate their logic. Appropriate methods for using abductive logic are still being developed.

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