*Helmut, Cathy, Josh, Mary, lists, *
*On several occasions over the years I've taken up the matter of the categorial assignations Peirce gave deduction and induction, the most recent being a peirce-l post of March, 2012, in response to Cathy Legg writing: "I don't see how one might interpret induction as secondness though. Though a *misplaced* induction may well lead to the secondness of surprise due to error." https://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu/msg00747.html <https://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu/msg00747.html>* *So, this is a subject which clearly keeps coming up, most recently by you, Helmut, while a couple of weeks ago Cathy and Josh Black, at the Peirce Centennial Congress at U.Mass--or more precisely, on the way from that Congress to Milford, PA, where a group of us placed a plaque commemorating that Congress on a wall of Arisbe, Peirce's home there--both held for induction as 3ns and deduction as 2ns, while I've been arguing, as has Mary Libertin on the biosemiotics list recently, just the reverse, that, except for a brief lapse (discusses below), Peirce saw induction as 2ns and deduction as 3ns. * *One can find in Patricia Ann Turrisi's edition of the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism notes for "Lecture 5: The Normative Sciences" a long note (#3) from which the following excerpt gives an account of Peirce's lapse (his brief change of mind in the categorial assignations), the reason for it, and his late tendency to more or less settle his opinion again as deduction being 3ns and induction 2ns. He writes:* *"Abduction, or the suggestion of an explanatory theory, is inference* *through an Icon, and is thus connected with Firstness; Induction, or* *trying how things will act, is inference through an Index, and is thus* *connected with Secondness; Deduction, or recognition of the relations* *of general ideas, is inference through a Symbol, and is thus connected* *with Thirdness. . . [My] connection of Abduction with Firstness,* *Induction with Secondness, and Deduction with Thirdness was confirmed* *by my finding no essential subdivisions of Abduction; that Induction* *split, at once, into the Sampling of Collections, and the Sampling of* *Qualities. . . " (*Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right* *Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism*, Turrisi, ed.* *276-7).* * Shortly after this he comments on his brief period of "confusion" in the matter. * *"[In] the book called *Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns* *Hopkins University*, while I stated the rationale of induction pretty* *well, I confused Abduction with the Second kind of Induction, that is* *the induction of qualities. Subsequently, writing in the seventh* *volume of the Monist, sensible of the error of that book but not quite* *understanding in what it consisted I stated the rationale of Induction* *in a manner more suitable to Abduction, and still later in lectures* *here in Cambridge I represented Induction to be connected with the* *third category and Deduction with the Second" [op. cit, 277].* * In the sense that for a few years Peirce was "confused" about these categorial associations of the inference patterns, he is at least partially at fault in creating confusion in the minds of many scholars about the categorial associations of the three inference patterns. Still, he finally sees the error of his ways and corrects himself: * *At present [1903] I am somewhat disposed to revert to my* *original opinion.* *And yet he adds that he "will leave the question undecided." * *Still, after 1903 he never again associates deduction with anything but 3ns, nor induction with anything but 2ns. * *As I wrote in 2012: * *GR: I myself have never been able to think of deduction as anything but* *thirdness, nor induction as anything but 2ns, and I think that I* *mainly have stuck to that way of thinking because when, in* *methodeutic, Peirce employs the three categories together in* *consideration of a "complete inquiry"--as he does, for example, very* *late in life in *The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God* in the* *section the CP editors titled "The Three Stages of Inquiry" [CP 6.468* *- 6.473; also, EP 2:440 - 442]--he *explicitly* associates abduction* *(here, 'retroduction', of the hypothesis) with 1ns, deduction (of the* *retroduction's implications for the purposes of devising tests of it)* *with 3ns, and induction (as the inductive testing once devised) with* *2ns.* * Best, Gary*
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