Abductive Reasoning

Abduction is reasoning to the best explanation. You see the grass is wet and conclude it probably rained — not because wet grass guarantees rain (a sprinkler would do it too), but because rain is the most economical explanation of what you observe.^[1] It's how a doctor reasons from symptoms to a diagnosis and a detective from clues to a culprit. Like induction it's fallible — the best available explanation can still be wrong — but it's the workhorse of scientific discovery and everyday sense-making, where we constantly pick the hypothesis that best fits the evidence.^[2]