Gary R., List: I am probably as big a fan of Mozart's music as there is, but I am struggling to understand your assignment of Peirce's inference terminology to one of his compositions. Maybe I just need to ponder it for a bit. For now, I want to focus on what I think is the crux of our disagreement here.
GR: In such places he offers abduction as the mirror of deduction, both inference patterns *commencing at the rule ...* This is what bothers me, right here--abduction DOES NOT commence at the Rule! Rather, per CP 5.189, it commences with the observation of a surprising fact--the Result. Only then do we start *searching* for a Rule that would explain it when combined with the conjecture that what we observed is a Case under that Rule. Peirce's bean example makes this very clear--we come upon these white beans on the table, go looking for a bag in the room that contains *only* white beans, find one, and guess that these beans came from that bag. Your alternative bean example, on the other hand, does not fit this pattern at all. In fact, it seems much more like induction than abduction to me--by taking samples from the bag, you are now *testing* the hypothesis that all of the beans in it are white. What surprising fact did you observe that prompted this particular conjecture in the first place? Admittedly, one reason why I lean toward Result/Rule/Case for abduction is because I simply find it more aesthetically satisfying to keep the propositions in the same sequence for all three inference forms. If we then present them in the order of a complete inquiry, some interesting patterns are evident. Abduction = Result/Rule/Case Deduction = Rule/Case/Result Induction = Case/Result/Rule * | Abduction | Deduction | Induction |* *Abduction | Result | Rule | Case | * *Deduction | Rule | Case | Result | * *Induction | Case | Result | Rule | * Notice also that each inference form now starts with the proposition that has the same categoriality--abduction, Result, 1ns; deduction, Rule, 3ns; induction, Case, 2ns. Attributing the same vector to abduction as to a complete inquiry makes some sense in light of Phyllis Chiasson's suggestion to use the term "retroduction" for the latter, rather than the former ( http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/chiasson-phyllis-abduction-aspect-retroduction ). I am not sure if any of these observations should carry much weight, but there they are. Perhaps we will finally just have to agree to disagree. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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