This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce's own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking.

Ilkka Niiniluoto comes to the rescue of realism in the philosophy of science. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject-matter. Niiniluoto surveys different kinds of realism in various areas of philosophy, then sets out his own critical realist philosophy of science, characterizing scientific progress in terms of increasing truthlikeness, and defends this theory against its rivals.

Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila wrote a classic statement of logical empiricism. Having experienced the foundational debates of the Vienna Circle in 1929, Kaila was a keen follower of the further developments of the Circle. His synoptic presentation and analysis of the basic themes, or "theses," of the movement was based on his lectures as professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. The work appeared as a book in Finnish in 1939 and a Swedish translation by Georg Henrik von Wright followed immediately. Earlier, a translation of his philosophical essays from the original German, entitled "Reality and Experience," appeared in 1979. However, this is the first translation of Kaila's major epistemological work, which remains a source for re-evaluations of Logical Empiricism.

Ilkka Niiniluoto comes to the rescue of scientific realism, showing that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject-matter. Niiniluoto surveys the different varieties of realism in ontology, semantics, epistemology, theory construction, and methodology. He then sets out his own original version, and defends it against competing theories in the philosophy of science. Niiniluoto's critical scientific realism is founded upon the notion of truth as correspondence between language and reality, and characterizes scientific progress in terms of increasing truthlikeness. This makes it possible not only to take seriously, but also to make precise, the troublesome idea that scientific theories typically are false but nevertheless close to the truth.