The recourse to abduction as a methodological function: specificity and validity in the processes of scientific research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show and demonstrate the presence, specificity and validity of the use of abduction as a methodological function, from a theoretical, empirical and expository approach. All this, in the context of the scientific research processes themselves. In an exploratory / descriptive key and reflexive critical development, the aim is to complement, for the proposed objective, the antecedent theory pertinent to the object of study, with the results of a previous documentary scientific research case that characterizes it, giving it specificity. The observation of the use of abduction as a methodological function was continued through the participation in evaluations of research projects in the university academic environment aimed at the construction of knowledge. The analytical strategy was always developed under the mode of content analysis (CA) and written documentary source. This journey allows us to support the validation and validity of abduction, conclusively rescuing, among others, the premise that not only abduction can be seen in the methodological processes of research (in its different forms of approach) but also allows us to affirm that there are no antinomical inferential modes in them, nor with its own relevance for quantitative and/or qualitative perspectives. That is, inferences, as an integrated system, act on demand of the object of study and not autonomously to the structural and paradigmatic design adopted by the researcher. All this implies that the researcher's position is decisive at the moment of thinking and orienting the research process itself, and in this line, abduction becomes visible as a necessary participant (although sometimes imperceptible or not recognized as such, for the researchers themselves) at the moment of reporting and interpreting and/or explaining the “creative” point or moment that initiates the research processes. The recourse to abduction initiates and strategically orients a methodological process in its explanatory inferential aspect, articulating with other modes of reasoning. In many cases it supports the scaffolding of a primordial argumentation (related to the generation of an explanatory hypothesis) essential to design and direct a possible approach (perhaps the best) to a singular (unknown) investigated reality, lacking predetermined or indisputable causal references.