Abduction and Thought Experiment in Baduk

In view of the ongoing controversy as to whether abduction is inference to the best explanation, it is by no means clear what abduction is. This situation seems partly due to the lack of clear examples of abduction in history of science. So, I propose to look for better examples of abduction in an oriental board game called Baduk (Go; Weichi). For, at the most crucial stages in the game, Baduk players delve into a sophisticated reasoning that is neither deductive nor inductive. As recent Peirce scholarship has unearthed game-theoretic, dialogic, interrogative, and strategic aspects of his thought, it seems a timely project to analyze abductive reasoning in Baduk. I shall show how to interpret Baduk players’ abductive reasoning as based on the so-called sequence dissection technique. Then, this technique will be assimilated to the proof-theoretic procedure of reduction (contradistinction to deduction) in Aristotle&s;s logical theory. Insofar as sequence dissections can shed light on abductive reasoning in Baduk, I shall argue, we may improve our understanding of scientific abduction at the same time.