Ben, you sent this right at the end of my time for philosophical studies
today. So I can't say much now, except that it relates to CP 7.198, to
which Jon Awbrey directed me when I inquired here about "the hard
problem of consciousness".
Matt
On 10/11/15 7:41 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:
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
--
Matt
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .