Jerry C., list,
Abduction starts from an observation that seems at least a little
surprising or complicative - something that _/calls for explanation/_.
It doesn't have to be an all-out shock. That implies that, if I
understood chemistry, I could pick out the at least slightly surprising
observations that lead to the abductive inferences that you talk about.
But I know way too little about chemistry to do that.
>[JC:] Can a deduction conclusion merely select one of many
possible conclusions without being /redundant/?
>What leads you to state that "abductive inference” is
/intrinsically wild/?
> What prevents abduction reasoning from being well-ordered?
BU: A deduction is redundant in its conclusion in the sense that the
conclusion is already entailed, deductively implied, by the premisses.
If the premisses are complex or numerous enough, one has a lot of choice
in what conclusions to actually draw. One may not have a deductive
algorithm for strategizing one's deductions. Some of the conclusions
give a new perspective on the premisses, and one usually prefers those -
those are where the merely implicit is rendered explicit. Then the
deductive conclusion seems anything but redundant.
Abductive inference in its "blackboard" forms is intrinsically wild -
the premisses do not deductively imply the conclusion, and the
conclusion does not deductively imply the premisses and is so far from
doing so that (unlike in induction), there's no fair-seeming way to
close the gap. On the other hand, it doesn't always seem wild, to the
extent that one has compensated for the formal wildness with natural
simplicity. Then it may seem anything but wild.
>[JC:] Do you consider an assertion such as “A sells B to C for D”,
where A, B, C, and D are nouns, that is, the premise is a polynomial of
adicity four, to be an atomic sentence, an atom of logic?
BU: If its form amounts to H(a, b, c, d), a valence-four predicate of
four individual constants, then it's considered an atomic sentence.
Best, Ben
On 5/1/2016 3:03 PM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
Ben, List:
While I agree with the first part of this post, these sections raise
questions.
Questions interwoven.
On May 1, 2016, at 12:57 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
In abduction, the 'result' is the surprising observation in one of
the premisses. In deduction, it's the conclusion which, if neither
vacuously stating a logical axiom ("/p/or not/p/") nor merely
restating a premiss or premisses unchanged, brings a new aspect to
the premisses, an element of novelty, even of surprise sufficient to
lead one to check one's premisses and reasoning.
Why do you assert that abduction is restricted to “surprising”
observations?
Is this assertion valid for any atomic sentence that is used to form a
molecular sentence?
Or, may several atomic sentences serve as premises such that a large
number of molecular sentences could be formed?
It's seemed to me that the 'new aspect' of a worthwhile syllogistic
deductive conclusion compensates for the deduction's technical
redundancy, its conclusion's saying nothing really new to the
premisses. This is likewise as plausibility, natural simplicity,
compensates for abductive inference's basic wildness. I don't think
that one can ignore either the ratiocinative or instinctual aspects
in thoughtful abductive inference.
Can a deduction conclusion merely select one of many possible
conclusions without being /redundant/?
What leads you to state that "abductive inference” is /intrinsically
wild/?
What prevents abduction reasoning from being well-ordered?
So, the question to me is, is the 'new aspect' brought by such
deduction a 'natural,' 'instinctual' kind of novelty, as opposed to
logical novelty (the conclusion saying something unentailed by the
premisses), **likewise** as abductive plausibility is a natural,
instinctual simplicity, as opposed to logical simplicity (a
distinction made by Peirce in "A Neglected Argument" the linked
paragraphhttps://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms#simple)? This
kind of novelty resists being usefully quantified likewise as natural
simplicity resists it. I don't know whether the sense of such novelty
is properly called instinctual. Generally abductive inference seems
to depend more on half-conscious or instinctual inference than
deduction does. But the fruitful tension between abduction's wildness
and its targeted natural simplicity is taken as a lot more troubling
than it should be, I think, insofar as that tension is like the
fruitful tension between such deduction's technical redundancy and
its targeted novelty of aspect or perspective.
Do you consider an assertion such as “A sells B to C for D”, where A,
B, C, and D are nouns, that is, the premise is a polynomial of adicity
four, to be an atomic sentence, an atom of logic?
Cheers
Jerry
Best, Ben
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