> On Sep 26, 2016, at 12:13 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'd like to emphasize again that it's a distinction that makes a difference: > methodeutical promise is not the same thing as plausibility or (instinctual) > assurance of truth. Many years ago here at peirce-l, Howard Callaway argued > against the idea that a hypothesis was more plausible simply by being easier, > more convenient, or the like to test. He ascribed the idea to Peirce, and Joe > Ransdell tried to defend Peirce but forgot about the critical vs. > methodeutical distinction (and I had forgotten about if I had ever known it > in the first place). I agreed with Howard that it was a bad idea, but I > couldn't believe that Peirce really believed it. I learned only later of how > Peirce dealt with it. Peirce made plausibility a question of logical critic, > and testability, potential fruitfulness, etc., questions of methodeutic. Thus > he separated them not just as separate issues of abduction, but as pertaining > to different levels of logic - very apples versus oranges. - Best, Ben
Ben, that’s very helpful and I vaguely recall that discussion. One problem I see though is that you have abduction built on top of conclusions of abduction. That is testability, fruitfulness and so forth might be a different level, but they are themselves abductive conclusions not all will agree with. This isn’t me disagreeing with you mind you. I think this is both the weakness and strength of abduction. It allows one to look at say the debate over string theory or supersymmetry from the late 70’s up until recently. There were huge debates over what counted as testability, whether things were testable, what counted as most simple, as most fruitful and so forth. Very rarely were these debates really conducted in terms of hard empirical tests. I think from a Peircean paradigm one could see these as a debate over methodeutical distinction at these different layers, but with people arriving at very different abductive conclusions. Further (and this is where I think Peirce’s common sensicalism comes into play) it seems to me that these change over time. So for instance early on in the 80’s you had many physicists like Feynman being very critical of a lack of testing along with the theories being too complex along certain criteria. (The math was very difficult) Then in the last decade you see the rise of a different set of criticisms closely related to the ones from the 80’s yet with different strength. So you have for instance Lee Smolin or Peter Woit emphasizing the lack of progress of string theory and it describing too much. Effectively they are making a kind of abductive argument against metaphysics that is quite Peircean. (In the case of Lee Smolin probably explicit influence since he’s noted the influence of Peirce on his thought) The problem is that while abduction isn’t instinct or intuition, at a certain practical point it’s built on abductive foundations that are themselves just a matter of acceptance. Put an other way, while we may drop down to particular arguments (such as how testable string theory is) those are themselves often very similar to the metaphysics Peirce argues for abductively.
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