Note - this is not the "abduction" that aliens do to you, for the definition of the word I'm talking about, read on!

Sitting at a traffic light on my bicycle just the other day, I was suddenly struck by something out of the blue. C. S. Pierce's model for scientific progress, abduction, was validated beyond all reasonable doubt. I'm sure he must have thought about this, but Louis Menand didn't mention it in his book on the topic - The Metaphysical Club.

Basically, the idea behind abduction is that knowledge progresses by successive proposals that we just pretend are true until something better comes along. The theories can come from anywhere. Indeed, many great scientists claim to have been visited in their dreams or by god or whatever.

But scientific theories "make sense," "are logical," and "can be explained in a deductive / inductive framework." Hah! Well, maybe. But what about astrology and Chinese Medicine? Where on earth did that stuff come from? I'll tell you (even though I wasn't actually there).

Dreams. Visions. God(s). Or Whatever. Mankind has been abducting for a damned long time, likely long before Aristotle codified the rules of logical inference.