Educating for uncertainty: Integrating abductive reasoning into the public policy curriculum

Traditional quantitative policy analysis often fails to effectively address complex, uncertain, and value-laden policy challenges due to limitations rooted in data unavailability, causal complexity, and difficulty in modeling value conflicts. This paper argues that, in practice, policymakers and advisors compensate for these shortfalls by employing abductive reasoning, drawing upon their experience and knowledge to fill analytical gaps. Abductive reasoning emphasizes the common policy tasks of generating plausible hypotheses from limited evidence, engaging in experimentation, and adapting to emergent outcomes. Considering its central, albeit often unrecognized, role in policymaking, the paper contends that abductive reasoning should be formally integrated into policy analysis education, where it is currently ignored or underestimated. Although many policy analysts implicitly employ abductive logic, formally teaching it and cultivating appropriate tools and mindsets can help deploy it more systematically, providing a more versatile and realistic approach to problem-solving than existing methods that rely on deductive or inductive techniques. Integrating abduction into policy curricula faces challenges, such as the risks of bias and misuse, which must be mitigated through transparency and intellectual humility. Nonetheless, the complexity of contemporary policy problems demands rethinking policy analysis education and reorienting it toward enhancing abductive reasoning skills.