Summary Of "Pragmatism And Abduction" By Susana Calvo

We have summarized here the essential of this book by the author.

PRAGMATISM AND ABDUCTION

In everyday life and in science, the beliefs and theories that we have play a central role to be able to interpret the facts that are presented to us. We always have a pre-existing conceptual framework, which conditions the information we receive, and which depends on each culture.

On a daily basis, we are faced with unforeseen problems and situations, which we try to explain through hypotheses; induction, which goes from true particular premises to a generalizing conclusion, not necessarily true, is useless.
You can generalize to easily observable questions, such as "All crows are black," but how do you inductively generalize a statement such as "All magnets move in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field" ?; A magnet can be observed through the senses, but it is not the case of a "terrestrial magnetic field", which requires not only observable (empirical) entities, but also unobservable (theoretical) ones. We see here that the role of ideas is fundamental in observation, to capture everything that remains hidden from direct perception.

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