> On Mar 26, 2015, at 3:21 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > > Good texts by Peirce to read on abductive inference, besides his discussion > in his 1903 lectures on pragmatism, include "On the Logic of Drawing Ancient > History from Documents" (1901), Essential Peirce v. 2, wherein Peirce gives > one of his most systematic accounts of abductive inference. He discusses > instinctual plausibility, instinctual naturalness (Galileo's "natural light > of reason") of abductive inference (or retroduction as he now called it) in > "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (1908) > http://www.gnusystems.ca/CSPgod.htm#na0 > <http://www.gnusystems.ca/CSPgod.htm#na0> in Section III and Section IV. > > In at least one writing, Peirce includes infantile training under instinct. > Still, the idea of instinct doesn't seem to tell the A.I. researcher much > about how to design an artificial intelligence that can abduce well. I don't > know how researchers have dealt with this.
I think this is the key problem. We’ve no idea how Peirce views these things ontologically. Are they ontologically fundamental? Probably not, although it’s hard to say given some of his later ontological positions. Instincts and intuition tend to be the “go to” for philosophers of that era when they want something to be fundamental without explaining it as such. (Think G. E. Moore on ethics for instance) Peirce doesn’t really go that far, yet if you take say his Neglected Argument with musements it seems he thinks we have some sort of access to things that might not otherwise be apparent at first glance. Effectively his use of abduction in the Neglect Argument suggests that abduction is something basic and not really reducible to other means. While not everyone would agree, I think Peirce is somewhat influenced by virtue ethics with regards to abduction. Thus abduction arises out of an optimistic development of an aesthetic and ethical life. Abduction isn’t defined except in terms of the practices of people who conduct good adductive reasoning. This reasoning can’t be formalized however. It arises out of consciously engaging with the living of each of our own lives and adjusting ourselves as we live. Because abduction is tied so much to a virtue ethics which the obtaining of habits through inquiry, attempting to explain it by a formalism like Bayesianism or probably even neural nets or any other computational scheme is doomed to failure. However in this it’s also important not to reduce it (as many do) to a mere psychologism. If it is a virtue ethics, it still is an ethics grounding a logic - of how we ought reason.
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