- The two conclusions being reached earlier

- The hypothesis being reached earlier

For the record, Ellen isn't coming up with these on the spot. These are things she's been told. What she's doing is organizing them into arguments.

(Which is still an impressive thing to do on the spot like that.)

LOGIC!

Upon realizing I was confused about the distinctions between inductive and abductive reasoning, editing this page turned into a speed run to learn about philosophical reasoning.

Napoleon and space aliens got involved.

The cause of my confusion turned out to be this: Not everyone acknowledges abductive reasoning.

There are plenty of videos that treat deductive and inductive reasoning as a dichotomy. It took me a while to realize that, and it affected how I interpreted what I was hearing. The line between inductive and abductive reasoning started to blur, and I wondered why abductive reasoning was even a thing.

So I read a paper by Charles Sanders Peirce from 1878.

Titled Deductions, Inductions, and Hypotheses (and read by me in a collection called The Essential Peirce, Volume 1), it argued for the necessity of hypotheses and how they differed from induction (it read like an early case for what would become known as abductive reasoning).

It also claimed that Napoleon existing was a hypothesis.

Numberless documents and monuments refer to a conqueror called Napoleon Bonaparte. Though we have not seen the man, yet we cannot explain what we have seen, namely, all these documents and monuments, without supposing that he really existed. Hypothesis again.

And I wasn't kidding about space aliens. From later in the paper:

Now, the facts which serve as grounds for our belief in the historic reality of Napoleon are not by any means necessarily the only kind of facts which are explained by his existence. It may be that, at the time of his career, events were being recorded in some way not now dreamed of, that some ingenious creature on a neighboring planet was photographing the earth, and that these pictures on a sufficiently large scale may some time come into our possession, or that some mirror upon a distant star will, when the light reaches it, reflect the whole story back to earth.

I’ll say this for the Napoleon examples: I will never forget them.

ANYWAY! I felt significantly less confused after I read that, and I changed Ellen's induction example. My earlier confusion had, in fact, resulted in the original actually being abductive reasoning.

Hooray for reading and hypothetical Napoleon being photographed by aliens!