A draft of a review: Sami Paavola (2011) Review of Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning, by Lorenzo Magnani. Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society 47(2), 252-256. LORENZO MAGNANI Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2009. XXIII + 536 pp. index. Peirce presented early formulations of abductive inference already about 150 years ago. Since then new interpretations have been presented (some of them quite independently of Peirce) but there is still a close link also to Peirce’s formulations. Lorenzo Magnani has written a new book on abduction where the main theme is not Peirce’s interpretation of abduction as such, but the book is very interesting also from the Peircean perspective. In this review I shall focus on some of the themes from this point of view. Magnani presents a broad view on abduction instead of presenting only one specific interpretation of abduction. This reflects the history of abduction. Peirce’s writings themselves give elements for various interpretations. It must be remembered that Peirce developed abduction (under various names) during a time period of approximately 50 years (from the 1860s until 1913) 1 . It is debatable how much Peirce changed his views on abduction. Usually two main interpretations of Peirce’s views are discussed; early on Peirce emphasized abduction as an evidencing process with a syllogistic interpretation, and the later Peirce emphasized a methodological process where abduction is especially related to the first stages of inquiry. 2 An even clearer change, which is not so often noticed, was the relationship of abduction to a “guessing instinct”. In his early writings Peirce already had argued that human beings have an instinct for guessing fertile hypotheses but he explicitly argued that this cannot be a basis for a validity of inference in general, nor of hypothetic inference. 3 In his later writings, this kind of instinct was more prominently suggested as a basis for abduction. 4 After Peirce, abduction was very marginally analyzed for a long time. An interest to abduction was awakened by a new interest in discovery in the1980s, N. R. Hanson was an early proponent already in the 1950s and 1960s. Abduction is still today closely linked to discussions of discovery (as can also be seen in Magnani’s book) but not necessarily. Quite independently of Peirce, Gilbert Harman formulated an inference-to-the-best-explanation (IBE) model also during the 1960s, which is different but so close to Peirce’s formulations that also it was called ‘abduction’ after a while. Magnani does not stick to one kind of an interpretation on abduction. Nowadays abduction is developed and used in many areas of research, for example: logic, methodology, semiotics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. It is then no surprise that there are quite different interpretations of abduction. Magnani clearly does not want to emphasize (potential) conflicts among various interpretations but aims at seeing a variety of uses of them. For example, when analyzing the role of instinctual aspects compared to “inferential” aspects of abduction he maintains that there is no real opposition between them. Many, me included, see this relationship as more problematic. Still I think that Magnani’s view is quite similar to what the later Peirce was suggesting. If we aim at