Find Out A New Method to Study Abductive Reasoning in Empirical Research

This article presents a new tool that provides a methodological context to observe and analyze, both qualitatively and quantitatively, manifestations of abductive reasoning in empirical research. Abduction is a form of a complex reasoning carried out to make sense of surprising or ambiguous phenomena or fill the gaps in our beliefs. Despite the ubiquity of abduction in professional and everyday problem-solving processes, little empirical research was dedicated to investigate this type of reasoning, and most of them focused on products of abduction-abductive hypotheses. Our instrument, Find Out, catches abduction as a real-life form of reasoning consisting of two phases-generation and evaluation of hypotheses. It offers the possibility to account on abduction from both product and process perspective and enables both qualitative and quantitative analyses on gathered data to be conducted. In this article, the task and examples of qualitative analyses of the data are presented.