Jon Alan, Gary R and list,
I think there is an alternative to agreeing to disagree on this question. If one thinks of inquiry as a cycle, more or less as I’ve presented it in Turning Signs (especially Chapter 9, http://gnusystems.ca/TS/mdl.htm ), then it becomes clear that the choice of starting point of the process is somewhat arbitrary, or at least depends on the purpose of the analysis. It also becomes clearer that the boundaries of parts of the process are not precisely fixed. Does abduction include the “surprising fact” which calls for a hypothesis to explain it? Does it include the judgment of plausibility or testability of the hypothesis? The fact that inquiry proceeds in a definite order does not fully determine how we divide it into parts or how we name the parts. The completeness of a cycle is likewise ambiguous, given that it does not stop but continues with another cycle, and sometimes the process will ‘loop back’ to an earlier stage before proceeding to the next. Another question is whether, or to what extent, we see the process of artistic creation as similar to the process of scientific inquiry. In the case of Mozart, for instance, a particular composition begins not with observation of a surprising fact, but with a commission, or some less determinate artistic niche to be filled. But in the practice of the artist, this too is a cycle: his commissioned work gets performed, the audience like what they hear or see, and this attracts more commissions and more audiences. Once the cycle is established, it may continue even if parts of it are missing — I think Mozart’s last three symphonies were not commissioned, but (we might say) resulted from the momentum of his creativity. (There’s a possible analogy here to the momentum that carried Peirce’s inquiry into the roots of logic in the years after the Cambridge, Harvard and Lowell lectures, when his continuing work was providing him almost no income.) I wouldn’t want to push the analogy between art and inquiry too far, for instance into the question of what role deductive inference plays in artistic creativity, but I do think this cyclic pattern runs very deep in all semiosis and in life itself. (Which reminds me that I first came across this pattern and diagram in Robert Rosen’s book Life Itself — but that’s another story.) Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 14-May-16 23:08 To: Gary Richmond <[email protected]> Cc: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: 6 vectors and 3 inference patterns 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 <http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt <http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt>
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