Peirce came to see deduction, induction, and abduction as distinct but interdependent “stages of inquiry.”17 Lowest in Peirce’s scale of mental processes is “deduction.” At the core of an issue, analytic, deductive reasoning leads to no new information, only elaboration and a restating of the facts. Next up the ladder is “induction,” a synthetic form of cognition that issues in a creative insight of generalization and classification (“therefore”) but that does not entail the hypothetical leaps and explanatory power of “abduction.”18 The mind works first deductively and inductively. Deductive
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