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Examples
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It means that many of our politicians are retroductive.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Too Many Lawyers or Too Many Laws? 2009
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About this time, Peirce began to hold that there were two utterly distinct classes of probable inferences, which he referred to as inductive inferences and abductive inferences (which he also called hypotheses and retroductive inferences).
Nobody Knows Nothing 2009
qroqqa commented on the word retroductive
Alternative term for the probabilistic form of reasoning called abductive: from the observation that Superman can fly it is reasonable (though uncertain) to infer that Superman is a bird or a plane, since that's the most likely explanation.
Term coined by C.S. Peirce, who thought it was close to if not exactly what Aristotle had in mind by apagoge.
August 15, 2008
booyoboy commented on the word retroductive
vocabcloud is so much cooler.
August 15, 2008