Von: "Jon Alan Schmidt" <[email protected]>
An: [email protected]
Cc: Peirce-L <[email protected]>
Betreff: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: 6 vectors and 3 inference patterns
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.
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