A Two-Tier Model of Abduction: A Unified Framework for Perception and Emotion

Jian Sun^*

• 广西民族师范学院教育科学学院, Chongzuo, China

This paper develops a two-tier model of abduction to resolve a central tension in Peirce's philosophy of mind: perception is abductive in structure yet involuntary and thus seemingly excluded from reasoning. I argue that this tension dissolves once abduction is divided into abductive insight, the spontaneous non-volitional generation of a hypothesis, and abductive reasoning, its conscious conceptually governed endorsement. This distinction clarifies the structure of perceptual experience: the formation of the percept constitutes abductive insight, whereas the perceptual judgment constitutes abductive reasoning. I extend this framework to emotion by showing that Barrett's theory of constructed emotion instantiates the same inferential architecture. Core affect functions as abductive insight into interoceptive change, while emotional categorization is an act of abductive reasoning that confers conceptual intelligibility on affective states. Predictive Processing provides the mechanistic background for this unified account by mapping abduction onto hierarchical prediction and error minimization. The resulting framework contributes to philosophical psychology by unifying perception and emotion under a single abductive structure and by showing how conceptual operations shape affective experience. It also suggests practical implications for emotion regulation through interventions targeting either core affect or emotional categorization.