Abduction as a philosophy of knowledge as well as a research method

Abstract

A challenge for theories of knowledge and philosophy is the relation between the world we perceive around us and knowledge or ideas about this world. What is it that we see? And how is what we see transmitted to mental images. Perception has therefore been seen as an important question within psychology. The question of what characterise the world we see comes to the foreground. Neurophysiology has developed during recent years and can identify where in our brain different perceptions are located. This development will continue with more and more refined knowledge of our brains functioning identifying neurons and locations in the brain where much of our perceptions take place. But this research can never answer the question what we see and perceive or answer the question how we build or construct knowledge of our world so that it becomes understandable and manageable for us as human beings. In this article I therefore discuss abduction as a possible theoretical point of departure to understand how we as humans with our way of perceiving the world we live in have been able to emerge as thinking individuals and social beings. In this part of the article I lean heavily on thinkers and researches such as Charles Sanders Peirce´s pragmatism, Jean Piaget’s constructivists theory of knowledge /learning and also on James Gibson’s research on perception. The pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty contributes by his global view on human knowledge.

The idea of emergence in contrast to the idea of development is central to my discussion in this article. Gibson provides us with the concept of abduction, that is how we as humans relate to our perceptions of the world around, providing us with a context that provokes action from us as perceiving individuals. Piaget’s research shows us how the child in interaction with his or her environment emergences as a knowing and knowledgeable person. Connecting these thought structures with Peirce idea of human thought as constituting three phases, that is firstness, secondness and thirdness where thirdness is our theoretical understanding of the world, secondness is the world we perceive and firstness is the world we assume is there for us to perceive, it is possible to conceive how we as humans in fact emerge as thinking and reflecting subjects. As humans, based on our actions within the world we perceive, we actually expand the world we have knowledge about. The world around us becomes more and more differentiated as well as an environment we know more and more about. We emerge as humans in the world that is ours to live. Development on the other hand implies growing towards a final stage for example adulthood or maturity. With the concept of emergence there is no final stage and is in line with the pragmatist Richard Rorty in his philosophical discussion of the growth of human knowledge.

We as researchers, within the field of pedagogics mainly focus people’s relation to the world around and conditions for different actions, thereby providing empirical data for research. The abductive reasoning about humans’ construction of knowledge is also applicable to the researcher who focus conditions for individuals’ construction of knowledge and action. In other words, the researcher is a participant of the object of research. What people perceive and what they understand of their life environment becomes a focus of interest that includes the researcher as well. Pedagogical research becomes in this sense an ambition to try and understand how people’s life world i.e., the world that constitutes the base for their actions, emerge. I propose that by developing abduction as a research method we may have a tool that facilitates this ambition. The assumption is that we as humans construct our knowledge, learn how our life world is constituted, where abduction is a reasonable concept, and that abduction can become a fruitful tool to try and understand this process of knowledge construction. In this connection I discuss data from different sources that can be of interest, such as literature, the public debate, and different groups participation in different activities. Here I connect to Richard Rorty and Chong Ho Yu “Dancing with the data”.