Jon, I understand your motive for changing the subject line, but I’ve changed it back because I’d like to return to the subject of “Communicating an Idea.” (Common sense should tell us that any study of “certain aspects of Peirce’s thought” will include some aspects (or “objects”) and exclude others. If I accuse your study of being “corseted” because it doesn’t include the aspects that feature prominently in my study, I am talking nonsense, and my complaint hardly deserves a response.)
Getting back to communication of ideas, I think one of Peirce’s major contributions to the logic of inquiry as the idea of abduction. But sometime late in the 1890s, Peirce decided that a better term for the concept was retroduction (RLT 141, CP 1.65, NEM 4.331), and that was the term he used in his 1908 “Neglected Argument” (and several unpublished late works). My tentative hypothesis is that retroduction is the better name because the retro- prefix suggests a backward or returning movement of thought. This seems to me related to Peirce’s analogy between causality and reasoning: just as we think of cause > effect as a forward motion in time, we think of deductive reasoning as a forward movement from premisses to conclusion. Retroduction, though, is works back from the observed effect to the hypothesized cause. This connects it with the circular causality <http://gnusystems.ca/TS/cls.htm#nlincaus> which seems to be characteristic of life itself. I’ll follow up on that with more detail if anyone wants me to. Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: 13-Jun-20 10:39 To: [email protected] Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Different Questions, Different Methods (was Communicating An Idea) Edwina, Jon A., List: Names do matter, and the alleged risk of conceptualism/nominalism is a red herring. When the kinds of questions being investigated are "What terms did Peirce use and what did they mean for him?" or "What was Peirce's conceptual framework?" or "How did Peirce analyze the universe?" then we must study his writings as the reality, or at least as the only available means of accessing the reality. When the kinds of questions being investigated are "What terms are commonly used now and what do they mean?" or "What conceptual framework best matches the current data?" or "How should we analyze the universe today?" then we must study the objective world as the reality. The answers to the first set of questions need not constrain the answers to the second, but they can certainly inform them, as long as we recognize and acknowledge the differences rather than conflating them. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
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