Made sense and remembered sense: Sensemaking through abduction

The purpose of this article is threefold: to present a general framework for investigating processes of reasoning and problem solving in market-related situations that are not transparent, to present some central processes involved in sensemaking, and to present a set of key elements of abductive reasoning. The paper focuses on the processes involved in making sense, on the on-line generation of explanations, and on logics more suitable for on-line and commonsense reasoning than classical logic. Although some of the roots of experts' reasoning must be aleatory (probabilistic), the focus of the paper is epistemic (causal) reasoning in illstructured domains. The professional decision maker is seen as equipped with a diverse mental toolbox. The on-line making of new sense is a process that we are only beginning to understand. Likewise, the process involved in strategy shift and the changing of mind are not well understood. Nonmonotonic, abductive reasoning is presented as a framework within which we can start to understand, and possibly re-evaluate on-line and creative economic decision making. Ó 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PsycINFO classi®cation: 2340; 2343 Journal of Economic Psychology 21 (2000) 691±709 www.elsevier.com/locate/joep * Tel.: +1-412-396-6255; fax: +1-412-396-4764. E-mail address: [email protected] (C.G. Lundberg). 0167-4870/00/$ see front matter Ó 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 7 4 8 7 0 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 7 1 JEL classi®cation: D81; D83