  The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction,
where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to
resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not
only within individual scientists, but often through conversation between those
who understand a particular scientific system and its anomalies (its insiders)
and those exposed to alien and disruptive patterns, theories, and findings that
could resolve them (its outsiders). These extended conversations between
scientists, scholars, and disciplines with divergent backgrounds define a
social logic of discovery by catalyzing social syllogisms that yield
speculative hypotheses with outsized impact across science. We show how this
approach theorizes a number of disparate findings from scientometrics and the
science and science, tethering them to powerful interpersonal processes that
link diversity with discovery. By reframing abductive reasoning as a social
process, we attempt to broker a productive new relationship between science
studies' focus on scientific practice and the philosophy of science's concern
with propositions in scientific discourse, rendering claims-making through
abduction a critical scientific practice, central to scientific change, and
increasingly available to science studies through small and large-scale data on
scientific communication and deliberation.
