Danko, Edwina, list,
Danko, I'll try to respond to the question of your abduction concept's
similarity or dissimilarity from Peirce's, and also make a few comments
about Peirce's idea of mind.
In reading your links, I didn't seen an emphasis on abduction's
plausibility as naturalness and simplicity, though you did seem to
accept such ideas in one of your messages to peirce-l. Maybe you
mentioned it at one of the links and I missed it, or maybe you regarded
that as a question for a more detailed discussion. Anyway, in previous
messages, I discussed Peirce's treating plausibility in terms of
instinct, but I've also remembered a 1910 passage (in his notes on his
earlier "The Doctrine of Chances"), in which he gives a very
Rube-Goldberg example of implausible abduction without mention of
instinct. The whole passage (CP 2.662) is the first passage quoted in
the "Plausibility" entry in the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's terms:
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/plausibility
Note that Peirce's discussions of abductive inference, like his
discussions of inductive and deductive inference, are generally
normative. He is not against discussion of how it actually is done, but
he's oftener focused on how it ought to be done. Hence, the importance
of the distinction between treating abduction (1) at the level of
'critique of arguments' (a.k.a. 'critic' and 'logic proper'), where
naturalness, plausibility, etc., play the key role, and (2) at the level
of methodology ('methodeutic'), where an abductive reasoner seeks
further justification in terms of testability, promise for expediting
inquiry, and so on. One is inclined somewhat to believe or suspect that
an abductive conclusion is true because of its plausibility, not because
it is cheap to test or promises to expedite inquiry in the near term, or
the like. The methodological level is that of the selection — based on
factors including but not limited to plausibility — of abduced
hypotheses as best worth testing. Peirce's view was that without the
reasoner's appreciation for plausibility, abductive conclusions would be
too much a matter of chance, and inquiry's progress would be hopelessly
slowed. Well, I guess that my point is that the question of your
abduction concept's similarity to Peirce's has partly to do with how you
deal with these issues.
* * *
It is true that Peirce uses the word 'mind' in a sense broad beyond what
most of us are accustomed to. In his later years, Peirce divided the
'special sciences' (which he also called 'idioscopy') into physical and
psychical wings. He was not very decided about which wing comes first or
even about how much the ordering mattered.
Physical - efficient causation (matter and efficient cause)
Psychical - final causation (form and final cause)
Yes, his idea of final causation is similar to Aristotelian and
scholastic ideas. Now, although he divided the special sciences into two
wings, he held that not two, but three principles are operative in the
universe: (1) absolute chance (a.k.a. spontaneity), (2) mechanical
necessity, and (3) the law of love, and are correlated to three kinds of
evolution of the cosmos and its parts, the three kinds respectively are:
(1) fortuitous variation, (2) mechanical necessity, and (3) creative
love. Mechanical necessity and creative love are correlated to efficient
causation and final causation, respectively. For a brief discussion and
a pertinent quote (with links in footnotes), see starting with the 3rd
paragraph in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agapism . This includes a
brief description of how creative love works as an operative principle.
In later years Peirce introduced the idea of the 'quasi-mind', that
which works like a mind even if it isn't necessarily an actual mind. See
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind . This includes a
longer version of a quote that Edwina provided, about thought's not
necessarily being connected with a brain.
Best, Ben
On 3/29/2015 10:21 AM, Danko Nikolic wrote:
Dear Edwina,
Thank you for that. See my comments bellow:
On 29/03/15 14:42, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
Danko - I think, cautiously, that your approach 'might' have strong
correlations with the Peircean approach, but, but..with some
necessary clarification before I'd change that 'might have' to 'does
have'.
First - what do YOU mean by 'mind'? If you mean only the human mind,
then, this would immediately deviate from the Peircean meaning of
'mind' - which is far broader. Mind, to Peirce, is 'final causation'
and has nothing to do with consciousness, human or otherwise.
"Mind has its universal mode of action, namely, by final causation"
1.208 in Detailed Classification of Sciences.
I must admit that I have no idea what that means. I cannot understand
this statement. At the moment, this is above my head. I would need to
pose dozens of questions before I could answer. For example, is this
"Aristotelian final causation? Do you mean not human, but human +
animal mind, or do you mean something even more? How can a mind have
NOTHING to do with consciousness? Maybe it should have LESS to do than
what someone else has stated? etc. etc...
Why not then using some other word than "mind"? What is the reason for
continue using this word and then meaning something else?
The Peircean approach rests in a basic axiom of the universe-as-Mind,
which sees that Mind as a rational force of networked order. For
example:
He is against the Cartesian dualism into two existentialities of Mind
AND matter, but sees
Matter-as-Mind.
Something like monads? Monads are also something I don't understand.
So, irrespective of whether you answer yes or no, it would not help
me. I just know too little.
I can accept that the mind comes first and that this mind is making up
concepts, ideas, etc ... to explain the world. And in this way comes
up with concepts of matter, physics and what not. But it is the mind
and only the mind that we have direct access to. So, one could say
that this is the only thing that really exists. The mind is only
explaining itself really, because it only makes up the concepts of
"self" and "non self", which are practical but are not "real".
This is how far my imagination can go. If Peirce goes further than
that, I have stuff to learn.
"The one intelligible theory of the universe is objective idealism;
that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws"
6.25. In 'Architecture of Theories and see also in the same 6th
volume: Man's Glassy Essense and Mind and Matter.
And:
"Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the
work of bees, of crystals, and thoughout the purely physical world".
4.551.
Ok, here is where I get lost. Without giving me some arguments or more
materials, examples, evidence, I would know even where to being
thinking about it.
My suggestion is: Read Peirce. DO NOT read secondary sources on him.
No matter how good they might be, they are 'not Peirce'. Read him in
the original. I would suggest volumes 5-6 of the Collected Papers.
And vol 1-2.
That is - you'd want to get a sense of his three categories:
Firstness, Secondness and particularly Thirdness. And a sense of his
analysis of Mind.
That would be great to do. And I may do it one of these days. Maybe
Evgenii will add something that will help me understand this stuff
better.
However, what I came here for was much less ambitious. I was just
hoping for a cross check of my treatment of logical abduction. I did
not have the ambition to account for the entire deep philosophy of
Perice. I didn't even know it existed in such a deep manner.
Danko
Edwina Taborsky
----- Original Message ----- From: "Danko Nikolic"
<[email protected]>
To: "Evgenii Rudnyi" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:54 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] abduction in the brain
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