Works
- Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis, Popular Science Monthly, 1878
- Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, 1903
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A founder of pragmatism, he named a third kind of inference besides deduction and induction, which he called hypothesis and later abduction: reasoning from a surprising fact to the explanation that would make it unsurprising. In 1878 he described it as inferring a case from a rule and a result, and in the 1903 lectures he called pragmatism the logic of abduction.