Induction, deduction, abduction, and the logics of race and kinship

C O M M E N T A R Y I n drawing a comparison between divinatory witchcraft and recent genomically structured craftings of race as heredity, Stephan Palmié (this issue) suggests that both practices have an inductive dimension. He argues, “If one can accept that divination . . . is a principally rational procedure to uncover previously unknown facts about the world by placing known facts under novel descriptions allowable within a specific epistemic order, then there is little reason to reject, a priori, a formal comparison with science as logically inappropriate or outrageous.” In other words, induction—reasoning by inference from particulars toward general conclusions—always unfolds with respect to a set of taken-forgranted knowledge claims about what the world is made of. Perhaps fittingly, and foreshadowing Palmié’s critical take on contemporary attempts to anchor African American “race” in some notional biogeographic and genetic heritage, induction has historically been the mode of reasoning employed by social scientists seeking to locate “African survivals” or “retentions” in African American material culture and practice—a tendency most recently diagnosed by Bill Maurer (2002) in his exploration of “the problem of induction” in the work of Melville Herskovits (see, e.g., Herskovits 1941; see also Ebron 1998). In both the old and new cases, inductive reasoning operates on elements that have already been conjured as “facts” (“African” customs or L2 haplotypes) within the epistemological frame (a trait-tracking historical particularism or a genetically backboned genealogy) within which the reasoning is to take place. I propose that an additional mode of logical operation is at work here as well, a mode that explicitly folds an emotionally freighted will-to-knowledge into epistemology and, indeed, that places hope and desire at the center of rationalist reconstruction. That mode is known as abduction and was defined in 1903 by semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as “a method of forming a general prediction without any positive assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justification being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally” (1998:299). Peirce’s