List,
Some may remember my attempts to outline, as forming a system, such
heuristic aspects, given by conclusions to premisses, as an abductive
inference's natural simplicity, an induction's verisimilitude, an
attenuative deduction's new aspect, and an equipollential deduction's
nontriviality.
I've hit upon something that strikes a novel (to me) but also Peircean
note, involving the idea of Firstness, so I thought I'd pass it along.
For a long time I was careful to distinguish between surprise (of an
anomaly) and bewilderment at excessive complexity or complication.
Peirce usually mentions surprise as the occasion of inquiry in general
and of abductive inference in particular, but occasionally mentions
complication as such occasion. Now, the idea of abductive inference's
natural simplicity seems more a response to complication than to anomaly
or surprise. I won't belabor that appearance, but will just say that I
wondered what appearance or feeling (akin to puzzlement, but not
puzzlement) would be the occasion of a chiefly inductive inquiry, or of
an inductive inference in the course of inquiry. Then it finally dawned
on me that I was paying too much attention to the temporal mode of the
feeling (overturning of expectation versus overturning of supposition)
and not enough to the overturning, the conflict. What occasions
induction (besides an occasioning inquiry) is not a conflict (a secundan
thing), a cognitive dissonance, but a sense of something _/arbitrary/_,
gratuitous, spontaneous, unnecessary though possible, which, in Peircean
terms, means a whiff of Firstness (see Peirce's "Quale-Consciousness"
for example).
If one has a sample from a population about which one had no particular
expectations, then any definite result is bound to seem arbitrary,
arbitrarily one-sided, to seem like some things that one has seen and
unlike other things (unless one supposes some Bayesian priors in the
absence of evidence, which isn't a Peircean approach anyway). While the
occasion of abductive inference seems surprising, contrarian, so to
speak, the occasion of induction seems partisan, it just takes sides.
This arbitrary character, while not surprising or perplexing, is still,
let's say, striking. From a non-Bayesian viewpoint, if one knew in
advance that that the population consists of reds and greens, and if one
found in the sample a 50-50 distribution of red and green, that would
still seem arbitrary. How does one 'explain' it or account for it? One
induces that the total population has a 50-50 distribution of red and
green; if true, then the sample's distribution is _/not so arbitrary/_.
I am unsure what emotional response to associate with such
arbitrariness. It may involve a sense of being detoured, skewed,
diverted, interested, something like that.
Best, Ben
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