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Visual Abductive Reasoning in Archaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Cameron Shelley
Cameron Shelley*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Waterloo
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ONT N2L 6E6, Canada.
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Abstract

Biographical studies have shown that visual mental imagery plays a significant role in the conduct of scientific research, particularly in the generation of hypotheses. But the nature of visual mental imagery and its participation in abductive inference is not systematically understood. This paper discusses examples of visual abductive reasoning by archaeologists, analyzing them according to the visual information and the process of inference employed. This work supports the conclusion that visual abduction is useful to scientists under certain conditions and that it is amenable to detailed study.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 278 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Paul Thagard and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This research has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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