Igor Douven, "The Art of Abduction" (MIT Press, 2022)
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What is the book *The Art of Abduction* about and why is it relevant?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share. A map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at occulehyphenmundi.com while you listen.
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Igor Duven, research professor at CNRS, which is France's National Center for Scientific Research. His book, The Art of Abduction, is just out from the MIT Press. How should we form new beliefs? In particular, what inferential strategies are epistemically justified for forming new beliefs? Nowadays the dominant theory is Bayesianism, whereby we ought to reason in accordance with Bayes' rule, based in the axioms of probability theory.
In the art of abduction, Duven defends the alternative inference to the best explanation, or abduction, in which explanatory considerations play an essential an essential role. In determining what we should come to believe. Duvin lays out and responds to trad traditional arguments against abduction. And shows how abduction can be a better reasoning strategy than Bayesianism in many contexts. He also considers how abduction fares in the context of social epistemology. And he provides an answer to the traditional problem of skepticism about the ex existence of an external world. using abduction. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Igor Duven. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Yeah thank you Kerry for having
Um, I'm looking forward to our conversation about your new book, The Art of Abduction. Um But before we start the actual discussion of the contents, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to become a philosopher or cognitive scientist and then Um how your interests led to this book?
Yeah. Um so I I started studying philosophy in nineteen ninety. Um until the I was a bit older already, I was twenty-seven at the time. Until then I tried to become a professional musician, a pianist, um which didn't work out and I had been interested in philosophy um uh at high school. Um so don I thought okay, um you know, now that music d um didn't work out, I uh I I will uh trying a philosophy. And I like that so much that I um Uh I state and uh I um I uh did my PhD at the University of Leuven, so I studied at the University of Utrecht, did my PhD at the University of Leuven, um got my PhD in uh ninety six. And um it was uh so I uh had been interested uh from the start in analytic philosophy, which was only at the time was um
uh uh was uh a very small field in uh in the Netherlands and in uh and in Belgium.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the book *The Art of Abduction* about and why is it relevant?
0:00–16:23
2
How did Igor Douven become a philosopher and what led him to write about abduction?
16:23–38:22
3
What is inference to the best explanation (abduction) and how does it differ from Bayesian updating?
38:22–50:08
4
What are the main arguments against abduction and how does Douven respond to them?
50:08–1:03:21
5
How does abduction perform in social epistemology and group belief formation?
1:03:21–1:07:45
Speakers
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