ABSTRACT

As far back as Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas expresses an interest in Peirce’s distinction between three forms of inference (induction, deduction, and abduction) as expressing the constitutive elements of the selfreflection of the natural sciences. Abduction, Habermas suggests along with Peirce, “is the form of argument that extends our knowledge” further noting that “only abducting thinking impels the process of inquiry onward.”1 Quoting Peirce approvingly, Habermas agrees that “If we are ever to learn anything or to understand phenomena at all, it must be by abduction that this is to be brought about.”2 While abduction is the logic that generates new hypotheses through the critical process of “determinate negation,” the relation between determinate negation and abduction appears arbitrary if “test and assumption, action and hypothesis are related to each other only externally.”3 Thus abduction is situated in Habermas’s writings as a methodical practical response connected to the stabilization of behavior by means of ongoing learning processes.