Abduction

Matt is missing. Bonnie's brother left his classroom to use thebathroom —and disappeared. A police dog traces his scent to the curb, where he apparently got into a vehicle. But why would Matt go anywhere with a stranger? Overwhelmed with fear, Bonnie discovers that her dog is gone, too. Was Pookie used as a lure for Matt? Bonnie makes one big mistake in her attempt to find her brother. In a chilling climax on a Washington State ferry, Bonnie and Matt must outsmart their abductor or pay with their lives.

A Harvard psychiatrist, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder, presents accounts of alien abduction taken from the more than sixty cases he has investigated and examines the implications for our identity as a species.

The world's bestselling master of the medical thriller, Robin Cook skillfully combines human drama and high-tech thrills with the latest breakthroughs and controversies of modern medicine. Now, in his most daring novel yet, a mysterious transmission from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean leads a crew of oceanographers and divers to a phenomenon beyond scientific understanding - a discovery that will change everything we know about life on Earth…

A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning. With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do. Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.

This book gathers together novel essays on the state-of-the-art research into the logic and practice of abduction. In many ways, abduction has become established and essential to several fields, such as logic, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy of science, and methodology. In recent years this interest in abduction’s many aspects and functions has accelerated. There are evidently several different interpretations and uses for abduction. Many fundamental questions on abduction remain open. How is abduction manifested in human cognition and intelligence? What kinds or types of abduction can be discerned? What is the role for abduction in inquiry and mathematical discovery? The chapters aim at providing answer to these and other current questions. Their contributors have been at the forefront of discussions on abduction, and offer here their updated approaches to the issues that they consider central to abduction’s contemporary relevance. The book is an essential reading for any scholar or professional keeping up with disciplines impacted by the study of abductive reasoning, and its novel development and applications in various fields.

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

This monograph attempts to clarify one significant but much neglected aspect of Peirce's contribution to the philosophy of science. It was written in 1963 as my M. A. thesis at the Uni versity of Illinois. Since the topic is still neglected it is hoped that its pUblication will be of use to Peirce scholars. I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Max Fisch who broached this topic to me and who advised me con tinuously through its development, assisting generously with his own insights and unpublished Peirce manuscripts. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1. A Current Issue in the Philosophy of Science 1 2. Peirce and His Theory of Abduction 5 3. The General Character of Abduction 7 PART I: THE EARLY THEORY 1. Peirce's Earliest Conception of Inference 11 2. Three Kinds of Inference and Three Figures of Syllogism 13 3. Ampliative Inference and Cognition 17 4. Induction and Hypothesis 20 5. The Method of Methods 23 PART II: THE LATER THEORY 1. The Transitional Period 28 2. Three Stages of Inquiry 31 3. Abduction and Guessing Instinct 35 4. Logic as a Normative Science 38 5. Hypothesis Construction and Selection 41 6. Abduction and Pragmatism 44 7. Economy of Research 47 8. Justification of Abduction 51 CONCLUSION 55 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION 1.

International child abduction occurs when one parent wrongfully (ie in breach of the parental responsibility of the other parent) takes a child to a country other than that of the child's habitual residence, or wrongfully keeps a child in such country. The author of this work was part of a research team that conducted a study, partially funded by the European Commission, to examine this problem in Belgium and Hungary, analysing cases from 2007 and 2008 and interviewing affected parents. This book is a revised version of the Belgian research report, which sets the problem of child abduction within its international context. It looks at the families in which abductions took place, how preparations were made for abduction, the quest for the return of the child (including legal proceedings) and the aftermath of the abductions. Throughout the book, the results of the quantitative and qualitative data are explained. What emerges is that when a child is abducted, the solutions offered by the law are often inadequate. Family conflict is a complex societal issue, and child abduction is a severe form of family conflict. Rather than responding to child abduction with strict and contentious legal proceedings, the book argues that solutions based on respect, psychological assistance, and a search for consensus should be favoured.