Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation Online Book Launch

Online book launch for Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation.

The Philosophy Department of Rutgers University, Newark is pleased to announce an online book launch for Ken Aizawa’s Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation. The event will take place May 18, 2026 from 9:00 am – 12:00 pm EST. The event will feature the historians and philosophers of science Uljana Feest, (Universität Hannover), Gualtiero Piccinini (University of Missouri, Columbia), and Samuel Schindler (Aarhus University).

Each commentator will offer a 30 minute commentary with a 15 minute response from Aizawa followed by 15 minutes of open Q&A. Anyone who would like to attend should email Ken Aizawa [email protected] be included on the Zoom link invitation.

Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation ishere freely available open access from Cambridge University Press.

About the book

Abductive reasoning is a form of inference that infers some hypothesis because of what that hypothesis explains. Unlike deductive reasoning, it yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. The theory of compositional abduction developed in this book provides a novel theory of confirmation. Kenneth Aizawa uses case studies to analyse how scientists interpret the results of experiments to support compositional hypotheses (i.e. hypotheses about what things are composed of) and suggests that they use a kind of abduction. His theory is offered as an alternative account of scientific reasoning that the logical empiricists would have interpreted as hypothetico-deductive confirmation. It is also an alternative to the Peircean interpretation of the role of abduction in science. It will be of interest to philosophers of science, especially those working on hypothetico-deductive confirmation, Peirce’s view of abduction, inference to the best explanation, and the New Mechanism.