Hi Ben, List, I meant to send the following response to the full List, and not solely to Ben.
What kind of analysis should we give for the phenomena associated with the kinds of surprise (e.g., wonder, bewilderment, failure of the world to meet my expectations for order or lack thereof, etc.) that seem to call out for an abductive or inductive inference? Here is one place in the Collected Papers where Peirce makes a distinction between the passive and the active aspects of surprise. He characterizes the qualities of the feelings of surprise as having a more passive character, and then the characterizes the experience of resistance to will has having a more active character. This fits nicely with the general line of analysis that he gives of these material elements of our common experience. Here is the passage: 8.315. [April 1, 1909] . . . let me give a little fuller explanation of my distinction between the Immediate, the Dynamical, and the Final Interpretants. . . The Dynamical Interpretant is whatever interpretation any mind actually makes of a sign. This Interpretant derives its character from the Dyadic category, the category of Action. This has two aspects, the Active and the Passive, which are not merely opposite aspects but make relative contrasts between different influences of this Category as More Active and More Passive. In psychology this category marks Molition in its active aspect of a force and its passive aspect as a resistance. When an imagination, a day-dream fires a young man's ambition or any other active passion, that is a more Active variety of his Dynamical Interpretation of the dream. When a novelty excites his surprise, -- and the scepticism that goes along with surprise, -- this is a more Passive variety of Dynamical Interpretant. I am not speaking of the feelings of passion or of surprise as qualities. For those qualities are no part of the dynamic Interpretant. But the agitations of passion and of surprise are the actual dynamic Interpretants. So surprise again has its Active and its Passive variety; -- the former when what one perceives positively conflicts with expectation, the latter when having no positive expectation but only the absence of any suspicion of anything out of the common something quite unexpected occurs, -- such as a total eclipse of the sun which one had not anticipated. Any surprise involves a resistance to accepting the fact. One rubs one's eyes, as Shaler used to do, determined not to admit the observation until it is plain one will be compelled to do so. Thus every actual interpretation is dyadic . . . . [As] pragmaticism says . . . (one part of pragmaticism, for Pragmaticism is not exclusively an opinion about the Dynamic Interpretant), . . . it says, for one thing, that the meaning of any sign for anybody consists in the way he reacts to the sign. When the captain of infantry gives the word "Ground arms!" the dynamic Interpretant is in the thump of the muskets on the ground, or rather it is the Act of their Minds. In its Active/Passive forms, the Dynamical Interpretant indefinitely approaches the character of the Final/Immediate Interpretant; and yet the distinction is absolute. The Final Interpretant does not consist in the way in which any mind does act but in the way in which every mind would act. That is, it consists in a truth which might be expressed in a conditional proposition of this type: "If so and so were to happen to any mind this sign would determine that mind to such and such conduct." By "conduct" I mean action under an intention of self-control. No event that occurs to any mind, no action of any mind can constitute the truth of that conditional proposition. The Immediate Interpretant consists in the Quality of the Impression that a sign is fit to produce, not to any actual reaction. Thus the Immediate and Final Interpretants seem to me absolutely distinct from the Dynamical Interpretant and from each other. And if there be any fourth kind of Interpretant on the same footing as those three, there must be a dreadful rupture of my mental retina, for I can't see it at all. Would it help to characterize the phenomena you are trying to describe in these terms? If we do characterize it in these terms, will we be missing something that calls out for our attention, or will the analysis be sufficient? --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Benjamin Udell [bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2015 4:41 PM To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: [PEIRCE-L] induction's occasion 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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