Nonideal Theory and a Logic of Abduction

Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive logic is a logic which provides a model of scientific discovery. The logic is meant to provide an account of how scientists discover (or pursue) hypotheses during scientific inquiry. I focus on a version of Peirce’s abduction, one where the hypotheses being generated are in response to anomalies, and argue that this logic of abduction is an instance of ideal theory. I show that scientific abduction is influenced by facts about the scientific community, and that features of systemic oppression systematically influence the processes of each step of the abductive process which abductive logic seeks to model. Peirce’s logic of abduction idealizes over these facts, and so I conclude that abductive logic is systematically inaccurate as a model of scientific inquiry. This work, then, provides an instance of a feminist philosophy of logic. By investigating the subject matter of abductive logic from a distinctively feminist perspective, I argue that the logic, itself, is in need of revision.