Clark, list,
Yes, methodeutical reasoning can itself be abductive, and if one builds
a house of abductive inferences none of which are quite compelling, then
it's guesswork, it could be a house of cards.
In the end we base all our reasoning on perceptual facts reached by
abduction, insofar as perception is a kind of non-deliberate abduction.
These abductions are occur in actual practice of math (the mathematician
physically sees the diagram, etc.) and various abstract fields, but are
(at least usually) not formally incorporated into mathematical
reasoning, nor into the logical and mathematical reasoning in fields
like statistics and experimental design, although such inductive fields
deal with issues of the reliability of perceptual judgments.
I'm no physicist, so my opinion on string theory matters little, but
people do seem rather impatient with it. It unites GR & QFT, but look at
all those vacua, etc. One finds people like Hawking and Witten on string
theory's side, and Penrose against it. As I understand it, the
tiny-scale quantum-gravity phenomena would be, as a practical matter, a
challenge for any quantum-gravity theory to test, not just string
theory. People argue whether string theory is currently the only game in
town (as a practical matter, not by mathematical proof) and whether it
promotes progress in other ways, justifying itself through the economics
of inquiry. There's the holographic stuff, black hole evaporation, the
dualities, string phenomenology, and applications of analogues of ST
ideas in condensed-matter physics (none of which topics I could discuss
even semi-intelligently without surfing the Internet in preparation).
Of course we would all like more.
Best, Ben
On 9/26/2016 2:28 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Sep 26, 2016, at 12:13 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com
<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote:
I'd like to emphasize again that it's a distinction that makes a
difference: methodeutical promise is not the same thing as
plausibility or (instinctual) assurance of truth. Many years ago here
at peirce-l, Howard Callaway argued against the idea that a
hypothesis was more plausible simply by being easier, more
convenient, or the like to test. He ascribed the idea to Peirce, and
Joe Ransdell tried to defend Peirce but forgot about the critical vs.
methodeutical distinction (and I had forgotten about if I had ever
known it in the first place). I agreed with Howard that it was a bad
idea, but I couldn't believe that Peirce really believed it. I
learned only later of how Peirce dealt with it. Peirce made
plausibility a question of logical critic, and testability, potential
fruitfulness, etc., questions of methodeutic. Thus he separated them
not just as separate issues of abduction, but as pertaining to
different levels of logic - very apples versus oranges. - Best, Ben
Ben, that’s very helpful and I vaguely recall that discussion.
One problem I see though is that you have abduction built on top of
conclusions of abduction. That is testability, fruitfulness and so
forth might be a different level, but they are themselves abductive
conclusions not all will agree with.
This isn’t me disagreeing with you mind you. I think this is both the
weakness and strength of abduction. It allows one to look at say the
debate over string theory or supersymmetry from the late 70’s up until
recently. There were huge debates over what counted as testability,
whether things were testable, what counted as most simple, as most
fruitful and so forth. Very rarely were these debates really conducted
in terms of hard empirical tests. I think from a Peircean paradigm one
could see these as a debate over methodeutical distinction at these
different layers, but with people arriving at very different abductive
conclusions.
Further (and this is where I think Peirce’s common sensicalism comes
into play) it seems to me that these change over time. So for instance
early on in the 80’s you had many physicists like Feynman being very
critical of a lack of testing along with the theories being too
complex along certain criteria. (The math was very difficult) Then in
the last decade you see the rise of a different set of criticisms
closely related to the ones from the 80’s yet with different strength.
So you have for instance Lee Smolin or Peter Woit emphasizing the lack
of progress of string theory and it describing too much. Effectively
they are making a kind of abductive argument against metaphysics that
is quite Peircean. (In the case of Lee Smolin probably explicit
influence since he’s noted the influence of Peirce on his thought)
The problem is that while abduction isn’t instinct or intuition, at a
certain practical point it’s built on abductive foundations that are
themselves just a matter of acceptance. Put an other way, while we may
drop down to particular arguments (such as how testable string theory
is) those are themselves often very similar to the metaphysics Peirce
argues for abductively.
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