Jeff D., Gary R., list,
I'm inclined to agree with a lot of what you say in 1. and 2. I'm not
sure about 3., because I don't know much about today's ideas about
'tacit knowledge' and 'expertise' in some sort of contrast with such
ideas in Peirce's time.
As to 2., some of the issues are terminological, and Peirce himself
varied in his uses of terms such as "inference," "reasoning,"
"argument," etc. Paavola's paper
http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/instinctorinference.pdf
has quite a few good quotes from Peirce of which I was unaware.
I've long thought that empirical (idioscopic) studies of people are
where a lot of 'nitty-gritty' study of abductive inference would take
place. But I would not relegate the study of a 'guessing instinct'
_/entirely/_ to empirical studies of people (as Paavola at times seems
to suggest, though that appears not to be among his conclusions), while
leaving the study of abductive form to philosophical logic. That would
be an unfortunate consequence of overplaying a distinction between
"abductive instinct" and "abductive inference." Philosophy can talk
about what kind of instinct one ought to have in order to abduce with
some hope of success. Given that Peirce in various places allows of
instinct that is not merely inborn but developed, his sense of
'instinct' shades by degrees into what some nowadays call 'intuition.'
Many mathematicians and scientists readily accept the idea of
'developing an intuition.' Fully conscious reasoning (if there is such a
thing) is comparatively plodding, and economy of inquiry is always an
issue as long as we have limited resources and hard choices to make, and
that too is always. If our resources are increased a billionfold, our
inquiries may become that much more powerful - only to reach new
economic limits. ("If you build it they will come.")
Peirce often discusses _/surprise/_ as the occasion for abductive
inference, yet occasionally also characterizes abductive inference as
reducing _/complication/_; and he characterizes the abductively
plausible as the "natural and facile" - the facile is the easy, the
simple, the opposite of the complicated. It's facile and natural in that
it fits one's well-prepared instinct, an instinct (or 'intuition', if
you like) based on personal or evolutionary experience in some sense,
but I don't think that the sense of natural simplicity consists solely
in the abduced conclusion's accordance with instinct (as some sort of
black box) and none of it in the natural simplification of the phenomena
considered, the bringing of a complicated tangle of facts into order. On
the other hands, the facile in this sense is not the same thing as the
feasible in the study of (multi-)constraint problems, which is
mathematical and deductive. I'd point out (as I'm doing all too often
lately), that all inference involves some sort of instinct-like
targeting of fruitfulness or promisingness of conclusions, whether it be
naturalness of abductive inference, verisimilitude (in Peirce's sense)
of induction, or the new aspect or the nontriviality of a deductive
conclusion, none of which should be relegated entirely to psychology,
sociology, etc., even though they all resist useful mathematization.
Best, Ben
On 4/29/2016 5:40 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
Gary R., Ben, List,
A few quick thoughts about some recent comments concerning abductive
inference:
1. Peirce uses the terminology of rule, case, result for the purpose
of exploring the relations between different forms of inference. The
question is, if the order of premisses (rule and case) leading to
conclusion (result) is helpful in an analysis of the genus of
deductive inference, then what we can we learn about the character of
the genus of inductive and the genus of abductive inference patterns
by changing the order around? If that is the question guiding the
inquiry, then I don't see the motivation for changing the terms that
Peirce is using to refer to each of the propositions. In fact,
retaining the terminology is a helpful reminder that what was serving
in the deductive pattern as a first premiss is now serving as a
conclusion in the inductive inference pattern (and so on). As long as
we are clear that we are retaining this terminology for the purpose of
exploring how inductive and abductive patterns of inference are
related to the deductive pattern that is taken as the initial model,
then I don't think there will any confusion. In fact, that
terminology helps to clear up a number of things that might otherwise
be obscured.
2. On the face of it, I would think that the question serving as the
title of Sami Paavola's essay involves a confusion. On Peirce's
account of inference, the question is not "is abduction an instinct,
or inference?" Rather, we have good reason for accepting Peirce's
claim that abductive inferences can be more instinctive (e.g.,
perceptual judgments), or they can be more self controlled
arguments--and that the inferences made by human organisms range as a
matter of continuous degree from those that are more instinctive to
those that are more fully under the self-control of the reasoner.
3. Paavola says: "Peirce, of course, did not have at his disposal
many of those conceptions that are attractive to the modern reader
from this perspective (for example the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’, or
modern conceptions of expertise)." While the terminology may have
changed a bit in the last century, I don't see anything in the modern
conceptions that is new--other than some shifts in the terms we use to
talk about the conceptions). As such, it appears to me that the
suggestion Paavola is making is simply false.
Am I missing something?
--Jeff
Jeffrey Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Northern Arizona University
(o) 928 523-8354
From: Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 1:55 PM
To: Peirce-L
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Is CP 5.189 a syllogism?
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