Towards a Logic of Hypotheses

Charles Peirce's 'retroduction' is a form of hypothesis generation that takes its place alongside deduction and induction as forms of enquiry and logical inference. It is the only one of the three that can generate innovation and advance knowledge. It is fundamentally tied to open systems theory and the world hypothesis of contextualism. In particular, retroduction is founded in ecological learning, our ability to directly extract meaningful knowledge about our world. Ecological learning and retroduction define the logic of discovery. This ability arises from adaptation through a process of coevolution rather than natural selection. The implication of this adaptation is that no firm barriers can be drawn between common sense and scholarly knowledge, nor between researcher and researched when the researched are human systems. There are three choices of relationship between action researchers and their researched human systems, only one of which - collaboration - respects the intrinsic nature of the people involved.