Gary F., List: I changed the subject line only because the subject being addressed had changed, and I am happy to resume the discussion of "Communicating an Idea."
In Peirce's late writings, he is consistently inconsistent about whether to use "abduction" or "retroduction" when referring to the kind of reasoning that he usually calls "hypothesis" in his early writings. As you note, he goes with "retroduction" in the Cambridge Lectures of 1898 and "A Neglected Argument" in 1908. However, he reverts to "abduction" in the Harvard and Lowell Lectures of 1903, even including it in the title of the final presentation of each series. Personally, I prefer "retroduction," both for the reasons that you give below and because "abduction" is much more familiar to most English-speakers as a synonym for kidnapping. As you may know, Phyllis Chiasson takes a different tack, claiming <http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/chiasson-phyllis-abduction-aspect-retroduction> that abduction "refers to a distinct form of logical inference," while retroduction is "the form of a deliberate and overarching logical method which incorporates abduction, deduction, and induction for its full performance." This solution is admittedly clever, but I find it utterly unpersuasive because I am not aware of any text where Peirce uses both terms, as he surely would have if that had been what he intended. Moreover, "A Neglected Argument" is unambiguous in identifying retroduction as "the First Stage of Inquiry," followed by deduction and then induction (CP 6.468-473, EP 2:440-442, 1908). By the way, you mentioned yesterday that the Lowell Lectures have now been published. I believe that Volume 2 of *Logic of the Future* only includes various drafts of the first five lectures that discuss existential graphs, not the last three, so the transcriptions on your website will continue to be a valuable resource. Thanks, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 11:17 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >
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