From Hypothesis Testing Towards Inference to Best Explanation: A PEEBI Testimonial Structure for Abductive Studies in Strategy

Abstract

Though scholars are increasingly employing abduction, there is no agreed-upon structure for its testimony, and, as we demonstrate, the hypo-deductive reasoning structure does not align with the epistemology of abduction. We propose an abductive testimonial structure, termed PEEBI, which consists of 5 acts in which the authors take prior knowledge and theories, establish the context and observations that are worthy of scholarly interest, identify candidate explanations that may explain the observed patterns, evaluate the candidate explanations, determine the best explanation, and abstract the best explanation to a more generalizable theoretical contribution. This structure makes communication of the author's judgment an important purpose of a paper and elevates the role of the readers by giving them the capacity to make their own judgments.

Keywords: Abduction, Philosophy of Science, Narratives, Testimony, Reasoning

JEL Classification: M1, A1