2 One must bear in mind the difference between logical certainty and psychological certainty. Induction does render many things psychologically certain-so much so that we are functionally unable to doubt much of what we have learned through induction, which amounts to practical certainty.

3 Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Red-Headed League," The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992), 177. Examples from Conan Doyle's fictional detective are fairly standard in the study of abductive reasoning. E.g., see Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).

4 Louis Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 29.

5 I have chosen to illustrate this point through the above hypothetical syllogism. Pojman uses a categorical syllogism:

1. Everyone wearing an arc-and-compass breastpin is a Freemason.

2. Mr. Wilson is wearing an arc-and-compass breastpin.

Therefore, Mr. Wilson is a Freemason.

The difference is merely formal. The point is the same.

6 The antecedent is the first portion of the first premise, the "If" section. The consequent is the following portion of the first premise, the "then" section.

7 Pojman, 29.

8 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:171.

9 I take the following statement from page 2 of Sweet's paper as an indication that he understands this point: "There are multiple modes of cognition, some more imaginative, others more rational. The mind moves from one to another all the time. They are in fact interdependent." I stress it only because of its importance.

10 It appears that Sweet is appealing to what Umberto Eco calls Creative Abduction. Eco helpfully identifies four types of abduction for us: (1) Overcoded Abduction-When the interpretive law (or hypothesis or framework) is supplied automatically/immediately. An example of this sort of subconscious reasoning, in which one makes a choice somewhat automatically, without giving conscious consideration to one's choice concerning the meaning of a sign, would be assuming that when one hears the sound "man" in a cosmopolitan setting that one is hearing the English word for a male rather than some other word that sounds the same in another language; (2) Undercoded Abduction-When the interpretive law (or hypothesis or framework) is selected from multiple options that are equally probable; (3) Creative Abduction-When no interpretive law (or hypothesis or framework) via which one interprets data exists and therefore a new law must be created by the investigator. An example of this sort of abductive reasoning is the sort of "paradigm construction" that Thomas Kuhn writes about in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962); (4) Meta-Abduction-This sort of abduction relates only to creative abduction, not to over- or undercoded abduction because their models and conclusions are drawn from the existing, prior world of human experience. The paradigm proposed by creative abduction does not. Therefore meta-abduction tests the proposed paradigm as to its verifiability (Umberto Eco, "Horns, Hooves, and Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction," in Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983], 206-7). In my response at EHS I suggested that Sweet was primarily thinking of overcoded abduction. Upon further reflection, I have decided that it is creative abduction that he has in mind.

11 Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:219.

12 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 122-26. Some teach that worldviews are best analyzed via philosophical categories such as ontology, epistemology, cosmology, ethics, etc. Such an approach is not wrong, and quite useful as a second level of analysis in fact, but immediately leads to worldviews that are so broad and general (theism, pantheism, panentheism) that they are somewhat misleading. After all both Islam and Christianity fall under the "worldview" of theism (or even monotheism). But clearly the Christian worldview is not the same as the Islamic worldview, nor is the Buddhist worldview the same as the Hindu worldview, even though both Buddhism and Hinduism are at least somewhat pantheistic in nature. (One could, of course, argue that Buddhism is actually atheistic in nature, and be correct, but Buddhism and Secular Humanism are nevertheless quite different.)

13 Louis Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 4th ed (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 30.

14 This means that we must preach apologetically not merely evangelistically.

15 The task of preaching is not to deliver a new word but to present God's word in the appropriate way. Often the very best thing one can do is to preach a deductive message that presents the truth of Scripture in a clear and elementary fashion.