On 10/20/2017 5:45 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
But John S found Peirce's tripartite diagram of the "main stages" of an inquiry inadequate and offered his own well-known cyclical diagram as a corrective.
Peirce's three methods of reasoning are fundamental. I was not correcting them. I was just observing that Peirce himself implied that they would occur in a never-ending cycle of inquiry. For example, note the end of his lecture on "Pragmatism as the logic of abduction" (EP 2:241):
The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both these two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.
Since every second of our waking lives involves new observations and performs some kinds of actions, there must be a cycle: Observation -> Reasoning -> Action, and repeat. Knowledge and habit imply memory. I used a soup pot with the label "knowledge soup" to represent all the organized or disorganized contents of memory, conscious or unconscious. A reasoning cycle may involve all three kinds, but one or two may be simplified or vestigial. A well established habit may have the form of an implication: if p then q. A new observation that matches p may trigger a deduction that predicts q and an immediate action. But even the activation of a habit may leave a trace in memory that strengthens the habit for the future, or it may generalize the habit by causing p to match a broader range of patterns. That generalization would be a kind of induction. Peirce also said that deduction never produces anything new. It must depend on premises derived by induction and abduction. That's why I put deduction at the end of the cycle and induction and abduction at the beginning. At the top of the cycle, I put the crystal labeled "theory". That theory may be a simple rule of the form "If p then q", it may be a hypothesis generated by abduction, it may be a more elaborate conjunction of rules or axioms, or it may be the result of a hypothesis from abduction that causes some revision in a previous theory. But there is nothing in that cycle that wasn't stated, hinted, or implied by Peirce's writings on reasoning, memory, habit, and logic. However, I admit that I was also inspired by my years of working and writing about artificial intelligence. The attached diagram soupcsp.gif labels the arrows of the diagram with various methods developed for AI systems. Those arrows are not a correction of Peirce's ideas. They cite methods that could be used to implement them. Peirce himself wrote a pioneering article on "logical machines" in 1887, and soupcsp.gif shows that modern technology can still be mapped to his categories. John
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