Abduction, Hermeneutics, and the Interpretation of Interpretations

This paper is concerned with two interrelated ideas: the first one is that the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was actively engaged with questions of hermeneutics proper and modified his theory of inquiry so as to be able to accommodate objects of investigation that are generally treated within a hermeneutical framework. Nowhere else does it become as clear as in his 1901 text “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, especially Testimonies” that what he calls abduction is not only a logical mode of inference but a comprehensive procedure for the invention and the selection of hypotheses in relation to conditions of subjectivity explained in terms of a pragmatic naturalism. The second idea is that the advances Peirce made in the field of philologico-historical inquiry can be made relevant with regard to the interpretation of data in every field of scientific activity. Being more than a strictly methodological proposal, Peirce’s ‘hermeneutics’ leads us to realize that at its core, all scientific inquiry hinges upon basic rhetorical and ethical fundamentals that guide cooperation within and across disciplinary boundaries.