What is an example Abductive reasoning?

Answer 1

Abductive reasoning is very common (usually in extraterrestrial species). This is when a person or alien has difficultly reasoning logically reasoning things and usually ends up turning to abduction. One example using a human: an overweight middle aged man leaves a fast food restaurant and goes to throw his trash away but a piece falls out. Instead of bending over and picking it up, he decides to be lazy and tell Mother Earth that she can kiss his trash. He turns and sees a little 8 year old girl has witnessed the whole incident and is going to tell her parents of his offense. He has to stop this girl from releasing his sin. He could have asked her politely not to repeat this situation, but instead he uses abductive reasoning and takes the little girl back to his apartment (aka abducting) where she can't spread bad talk about him. Another example using an alien: a few aliens are cruising around one night and decide to pay Earth a little visit for the fun of it. They stop in the middle of a field of crops somewhere and decide to do some vandalism and screw the farmer over for the year by making crop circles. Right in the middle of this act, the farmer comes out with his pitchfork and a camera. At this point, the aliens could have taken the farmer's camera and erased his memory, but instead they used abductive reasoning and took the farmer into their spaceship (aka abducting) and deciding to do some experiments on him while they were at it. As you can see, abductive reasoning isn't the healthiest or best way to reason out situations, but in the end a decision is made and that is what truly counts.