The Social Abduction of Science

TL;DR

This paper redefines scientific abduction as a social process involving conversations between insiders and outsiders, highlighting its role in scientific discovery and innovation through diverse interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a social framework for understanding abduction, linking interpersonal processes to scientific innovation and bridging science studies with philosophy of science.

Findings

Social abduction involves dialogues between insiders and outsiders.

Diverse interactions catalyze impactful scientific hypotheses.

Empirical data supports the social nature of scientific discovery.

Abstract

The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only within individual scientists, but often through conversation between those who understand a particular scientific system and its anomalies (its insiders) and those exposed to alien and disruptive patterns, theories, and findings that could resolve them (its outsiders). These extended conversations between scientists, scholars, and disciplines with divergent backgrounds define a social logic of discovery by catalyzing social syllogisms that yield speculative hypotheses with outsized impact across science. We show how this approach theorizes a number of disparate findings from scientometrics and the science and science, tethering them to powerful interpersonal processes that link diversity with discovery. By reframing abductive reasoning as a social process, we attempt to broker a productive new relationship between science studies' focus on scientific practice and the philosophy of science's concern with propositions in scientific discourse, rendering claims-making through abduction a critical scientific practice, central to scientific change, and increasingly available to science studies through small and large-scale data on scientific communication and deliberation.