Peircean abduction is a form of non-deductive intuition where one reasons “downward” from conclusions: after fixing belief in a particular conclusion, one determines based on “coherence, intuition, or analogy” what conditions would have to hold for the conclusion to be true (Viteri & DeDeo, 2022). In other words, the truth of previous claims are established by necessity.
In their stochastic model of mathematical reasoning, Wolpert & Kinney (2024) define abduction as using the explanatory power of a claim to infer its probability of being correct.