Nick--Here's a blurb on abduction, part of a lecture I did earlier this year on how to tell if something is a "real" ethnography. The full pack of lies available on request. The delete key might be a better choice. Mike Peirce’s abductive logic formalizes this critical part of any ethnographic trajectory. Let me borrow from an unpublished paper by Michael Hoffman, an artificial intelligence researcher at Bielefeld University. Here, in Peirce’s own words, as quoted by Hoffman, is abductive logic: The surprising fact, F, is observed The “surprising fact F” echoes what I call “rich points.” Rich points are the raw material of ethnographic research. They run the gamut from incomprehensible surprise to departure from expectations to glitches in an aggregate data set. As Peirce would have advocated, the purpose of ethnography is to go forth into the world, find and experience rich points, and then take them seriously as a signal of a difference between what you know and what you need to learn to understand and explain what just happened. People are said to be creatures of habit and seekers of certainty. Abduction turns them into the opposite. How do we make sense of all these big and little “F’s?” We don’t just box them in with old concepts in the style of inductive logic. Instead, we imagine “H’s” that might explain them. We imagine. The surprise F, the rich point, calls on us to create, to think, to make up an antecedent H that does indeed imply the consequent. Where did that F come from? Well, what if… H? Rather than reaching into the box and pulling out a concept ready at hand, we make up some new ones. Any trajectory in the ethnographic space will run on the fuel of abduction. You’ll read or see how surprises came up, how they were taken seriously, and how they were explained using concepts not anticipated when the story started. We need to reign in our enthusiasm a bit. Peirce wants some plausibility. Stephen King just wrote a new thriller where, the review said, a pulse transmitted through cell phones turns users who happen to be calling at the time into monsters. The plot appeals to me, but the likelihood that the story will turn into an actual news item is pretty slim. It’s probably an entertaining read, but a plausible scenario? Peirce also wants us to follow up the abductive epiphany with some tedious work. And the tedious work looks a lot like old-fashioned science. We need to systematically collect, compare and contrast, try to prove the new H à P link wrong, all that systematic drudgery, whether we’re in the lab or in the field. It reminds me of one of my favorite Einstein quotes, that he never made a significant scientific discovery using rational analytic thought. But he did a lot of work after the discovery to test it out. And it reminds me of Edison’s famous quote, since I mentioned his museum a while back--Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And it reminds me of why I like the first days of ethnographic work the best, because they are the most creative part where the learning curve accelerates exponentially. Hoffman also emphasizes that the range of imagination in play is bounded by history. We can only stretch so far is the sad moral of the story. Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” about which I learned much from education colleagues during my visit, is a case in point. But still, some stretching is better than no stretching at all. That’s the message that abduction conveys. On Aug 14, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
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