Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research by Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans (review)

Charles S. Peirce’s conception of abductive reasoning became a hot topic in the philosophy of science after World War II, when N. R. Hanson suggested that abduction is a logic of discovery, Gilbert Harman argued that all types of inductive reasoning can be reduced to inference to the best explanation (IBE), and Howard Smokler suggested that abduction as inverse deduction is an important method of confirmation. Abduction has been a popular theme also in Artificial Intelligence. Illustrations and examples of abduction have been sought in everyday life, detective stories, and many scientific disciplines from astronomy to medicine.

Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans have published a book on qualitative research which is a welcome addition to the growing literature on abduction. They are both professors of sociology with a solid background in cultural research: Tavory (from the New York University) has studied condom use in developing countries and religious identities among Jewish Orthodox neighborhoods, Timmermans (from the University of California, Los Angeles) postmortem examinations of suspicious deaths and newborn genetic screening.

The book consists of an Introduction, seven Chapters, a Conclusion, and a Synopsis of abductive analysis.

The basic thesis of Tavory and Timmermans, outlined in the Introduction, is that Peirce’s pragmatism helps to understand the relationship among data, method, and theory in a fruitful way which avoids the pitfalls of current approaches in qualitative research. The standard methodology of data analysis, as developed in Barney Glaser’s and Anselm Strauss’s frequently cited The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967), is based on induction which is supposed to be uncontaminated by preexisting theories. This empirical approach has been supplemented with software programs for data analysis and linked to symbolic interactionism and social constructivism. Its main alternative has been the extended case method of the Manchester school of British anthropology. This method starts from one’s favorite theory and tries to extend or elaborate it in the light of research data, but thereby locks theory construction into predefined conceptual boxes. It is stated that this method has been inspired by Imre Lakatos, but its description seems to be related to Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm-based normal science as well.

In Chapter 1, Tavory and Timmermans argue that the inductive grounded theory and the deductive extended case method should be replaced by Peirce’s abduction, which views research as recursively moving back and forth between observations and theoretical generalizations. They characterize abduction as a creative inferential process producing new theoretical hypotheses on the basis of surprising evidence, and for such hypotheses we then need to gather more observations. In this way, abductive analysis is a genuine alternative to induction and deduction. The authors also suggest that Peirce’s important contribution to philosophy of science was his refusal of the distinction between discovery and justification – later emphasized by Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper.

In Chapter 2, Tavory and Timmermans introduce a semiotic method of meaning construction as a basis of abductive analysis. Qualitative researchers typically study other people by conducting interviews and observing behavior, so that their research data is meaningful to the agents under study. But the researchers have to decipher and create their own interpretation of this data. Qualitative research can thus be viewed as “second-order meaning-making”, where “researchers construct meaning of people who act upon meaning during their daily lives”. Instead of traditional hermeneutics, the authors find the tool of their treatment of meaning in Peirce’s semiotics, i.e. the triad of sign, object, and interpretant. They take Peirce to be a tempered realist, who allows the object to offer resistance to interpretations. The interpretant is the effect or transformation – understanding, emotion, or action – that the interpreter undergoes while using or making sense of a sign. In creative meaning-making new theoretical insights may emerge when semiotic triads are iterated as spirals.

In the next chapters, the authors illustrate the abductive process of fitting unexpected findings into an interpretative theoretical framework by showing how the...