Nature - autonomous learning

216 the dis/unity of geographyBox 4.6 ABDUCTIONAbduction is a process of working back from an observed effect toa possible cause or causes. It is an imaginative act of conjecturingwhat would have caused the effect to occur, even though the cause(or causes) cannot be observed and cannot be identified for sure.Causal processes are often invisible and they interact with otherphenomena in such a way that their existence is often not easy toidentify. Abduction is central to critical (or transcendental) realistthinking and especially necessary in physical-geography research.Since many of the phenomena studied by physical geographers arepolygenetic – having multiple causes operating simultaneously– it is not at all easy to work back from effects to causes. This is particularlytrue at large spatio-temporal scales – as when one is tryingto explain landform evolution in, say, the Andes. This is where carefulabduction comes in. Abductive reasoning involves disentanglingin the mind causal mechanisms that, in reality, might interactdifferently in different situations to produce the same (or different)visible effects. The researcher wields a mental scalpel, as it were,cutting into the connective tissue of the world at different angles inorder to identify the constituent factors at work. Thus the majorprocesses involved in creating and shaping the Andean mountainrange might have different effects in the Himalayas. But this can onlybe established by reasoned and rigorous abduction from visibleevidence to possible causal mechanisms. Using existing knowledgeof likely causal mechanisms one conjectures as to whether and howthey are operative in the Andean case. Subsequently, new evidencecan be analysed that may confirm or disconfirm the explanationabductive reasoning produces (and so on iteratively in a virtuousspiral of conjecture and empirical testing).studying an arroyo severs their object of study from its wider local andregional context in order to focus in depth on gully formation.The questionthen arises: is the geographer in question making the right ‘cuts’? Canone arroyo be studied without reference to its connections with other