> On Apr 3, 2015, at 12:04 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > > You wrote, > > While not everyone would agree, I think Peirce is somewhat influenced by > virtue ethics with regards to abduction. Thus abduction arises out of an > optimistic development of an aesthetic and ethical life. Abduction isn’t > defined except in terms of the practices of people who conduct good > a[b]ductive reasoning. This reasoning can’t be formalized however. It arises > out of consciously engaging with the living of each of our own lives and > adjusting ourselves as we live. > > Peirce doesn't quite _define_ abductive inference in terms of the practices > of people who conduct good abductive reasoning. Most generally he defines it > as a conjecture that arises in the mind in order to explain (successfully or > not) a surprising phenomenon, and ultimately concludes that abducing has very > little to do with rules, and that the pragmatic maxim is necessary and > sufficient as a rule for it, to the extent that it follows rules at all. He > does offer particular forms of abductive inference - in earlier years, a > reordering of the Barbara syllogism, and in 1903 another form. I agree that > we should not regard those forms as _definitions_ of abductive inference, but > likewise I think that we should not regard the Barbara syllogistic form as > the _definition_ of deduction. > >
Well to talk about good or bad abduction seems independent from saying what abduction is. When he talks about abduction most clearly I think he opposes it to induction and deduction when he makes what abduction is most clearly. The problem is that once you remove rules you then have practices that are successful or not without saying what makes them successful beyond whether they achieve those ends. Contrast this with induction or deduction where we can often tell reasoning was done poorly without knowing if the answer is correct. I’ve often thought a good way to think about abduction is as the reversal of the semiotic process. Especially in his late thought on signs, such as in the letters to Lady Welby, he talks of the gap between the object to the interpretant in a sign. This gap must be bridged by a guess when one moves backwards towards ones object. The clearing of this gap is fundamentally what abduction is about. > Really, none of these fruitful/promising aspects (nontriviality, novelty, > verisimilitude, plausibility / natural simplicity) lend themselves to useful > quantification, yet A.I. research could take some sort of interest in all of > them, since, if they were to be generally absent, no mind would bother to > infer. In the case of deduction, special forms or schemata (e.g., the > categorical syllogisms) are developed in order to assure some modicum of > novelty or nontriviality in deduction, but how would one teach an A.I. what > such novelty or nontriviality are? How would it catch on to the idea in > general? If an instinct is not involved, then what is involved? I’m a bit biased here, but I think that most of these aspects of reasoning are tied to embodied practices such that they are inherently non-computable. (Say here the Heideggarian line of reasoning that critiques of AI such as that by Dreyfus take) There are ways to simulate simplicity, such as variants of Ockham by minimizing categories. But that’s really not simplicity of the sort I think we use in our day to day experience. More an inference from simplicity. The common error in AI, in my opinion, is in assuming some simplified representation of simplicity, plausibility or so forth is the same thing as our experience of such in daily lives. Again, I’m not saying these aren’t extremely useful. I think the computational methods we’ve discovered the past decades have been extremely beneficial. I just don’t think they are the same was what humans do.
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