[John]
I would addendumize further: we do not deduce Quality, we induce it it.
[Arlo]
Would you consider that we "abduce" it?
From Wikipedia: "Abduction is a method of logical inference
introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce which comes prior to induction
and deduction for which the colloquial name is to have a "hunch".
Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of
seemingly unrelated facts, armed with an intuition that they are
somehow connected. The term abduction is commonly presumed to mean
the same thing as hypothesis; however, an abduction is actually the
process of inference that produces a hypothesis as its end result"
Tie to ZMM:
"The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the
categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows.
A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and
suddenly...flash!...he understands something he didn't understand
before. Until it's tested the hypothesis isn't truth. For the tests
aren't its source. Its source is somewhere else. Einstein had said:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a
simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to
some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of
experience, and thus to overcome it -- .He makes this cosmos and its
construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this
way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow
whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task...is to arrive
at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built
up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only
intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can
reach them -- .Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of
scientific knowledge."
Some snippets from Umberto Eco's "The Sign of Three":
"(Quoting Peirce).. there can be no reasonable doubt that man's mind,
having been developed under the influence of the laws of nature, for
that reason naturally thinks somewhat after nature's pattern'
(Peirce). 'It is evident,' he writes, 'that unless man has some
inward light tending to make his guesses... much more than they would
be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated
for its utter incapacity in the struggles for existence... '
(Peirce). In addition to the principle that the human mind is, as a
result of natural evolutionary processes, predisposed to guessing
correctly about the world, Peirce proposes a second conjectural
principle to partially explain the phenomenon of guessing, namely
that 'we often derive from observation strong intimations of truth,
without being able to specify what were the circumstances we had
observed which conveyed those intimations' (Peirce). ... The
different elements of a hypothesis are in our minds before we are
conscious of entertaining it, "but it is the idea of putting together
what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes
the new suggestion before our contemplation' (Peirce)
... Abduction.. is an instinct which relies upon unconscious
perception of connections between aspects of the world..."
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