Peircers, Present business has kept me from following very many of the recent discussions on Peirce's 3 types of reasoning, but we have of course been down this road before, and so old tunes keep coming to mind whenever I get a chance to sample the stream.
So I think I'll try using this thread to post what incidental reflections I have, as they come to mind, in no particular order. First, to the question recently discussed by Gary R. and Jon S., being most fresh in mind. Inquiry situations where both premisses, major and minor, rule and case, arise at roughly the same time are very common, maybe even the archetype. Aristotle said somewhere that the essence of wit was quickly grasping the middle term, and I somewhat later dubbed this the process of discovering a “trial factorization” of a problem space or phenomenal field. There is a bit of discussion in the following project proposal: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems : The Trees, The Forest http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Prospects_for_Inquiry_Driven_Systems#The_Trees.2C_The_Forest <QUOTE> For the present purpose, it should be recognized that this “trial factorization” of a problem space or phenomenal field is an important intellectual act in itself, one that deserves attention in the effort to understand the competencies that support intelligent functioning. It is a good question to ask just what sort of reasoning processes might be involved in the ability to find such a middle term, as is served by “knowledge” in the example at hand. Generally speaking, interest will reside in a whole system of middle terms, which might be called a “medium” of the problem domain or the field of phenomena. This usage makes plain the circumstance that the very recognition and expression of a problem or phenomenon is already contingent upon and complicit with a particular set of hypotheses that will inform the direction of its resolution or explanation. </QUOTE> Regards, Jon On 4/25/2016 9:40 PM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
Peircers, Here's an example I've mentioned several times before, giving one of Peirce's earliest treatments of the three types of reasoning, from his Harvard Lectures of 1865 “On the Logic of Science”. It illustrates how one and the same proposition might be reached from three different directions, as the end result of an inference in each of the three modes. http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Functional_Logic_:_Inquiry_and_Analogy#1.2._Types_of_Reasoning_in_C.S._Peirce Preceding that section there is a table of diagrams giving a rough illustration of how the three types of inference relate to Aristotle's figures of the syllogism. http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Functional_Logic_:_Inquiry_and_Analogy#1.1._Types_of_Reasoning_in_Aristotle Regards, Jon
-- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
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