Peirce’s Theory of the Origin of Abduction in Aristotle

This paper aims to show, first, that Peirce’s theory of the origin of abduction in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics II.25 is mistaken, for Peirce forced the dialectical syllogisms of that passage to resemble his conception of abduction as a syllogism of the second figure that attempts to infer a minor premise. Second, it aims to show that there are abductive syllogisms in other passages of Aristotle’s work that Peirce neglected. In those passages, Aristotle distinguished between the syllogism that infers the fact and the one that infers the reason. The latter is a syllogism in the second figure that explains the cause of a phenomenon, and it has been qualified by ancient and modern comentators as the syllogism of discovery. Moreover, Aristotle related that kind of syllogism with the mental capacity of discovering the cause, namely, anchinoia, translated as the skill of conjecture or sagacity.