Thanks, Gary, this is a very helpful summary. Jon
cc: Arisbe, Inquiry, Peirce List Gary Richmond wrote:
Cathy, Stephen, list, Cathy, you wrote: "I don't see how one might interpret induction as secondness though.Though a *misplaced* induction may well lead to the secondness of surprise due to error." And yet that's exactly how Peirce saw it for most of his career (with the brief lapse mentioned in my earlier post and commented on by him in the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism). There he wrote: "Abduction, or the suggestion of an explanatory theory, is inference through an Icon, and is thus connected with Firstness; Induction, or trying how things will act, is inference through an Index, and is thus connected with Secondness; Deduction, or recognition of the relations of general ideas, is inference through a Symbol, and is thus connected with Thirdness. . . [My] connection of Abduction with Firstness, Induction with Secondness, and Deduction with Thirdness was confirmed by my finding no essential subdivisions of Abduction; that Inducion split, at once, into the Sampling of Collections, and the Sampling of Qualities. . . " (*Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism*, Turrisi, ed. 276-7). Shortly after this he comments on his brief period of "confusion" in the matter. "[In] the book called *Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University*, while I stated the rationale of induction pretty well, I confused Abduction with the Second kind of Induction, that is the induction of qualities. Subsequently, writing in the seventh volume of the Monist, sensible of the error of that book but not quite understanding in what it consisted I stated the rationale of Induction in a manner more suitable to Abduction, and still later in lectures here in Cambridge I represented Induction to be connected with the third category and Deduction with the Second" [op. cit, 277]. [You can also read the entire deleted section by googling "At the time I first published this division of inference" and 'Peirce'.] So, as he sees he, for those few years Peirce was "confused" about these categorial associations. In that sensePeirce is certainly at least partially at fault in creating a confusion in the minds of many a thinker about the categorial associations of the three inference patterns. Still, he continues in that section by stating: "At present [that is, in 1903] I am somewhat disposed to revert to my original opinion" yet adds that he "will leave the question undecided." Still, after 1903 he never associates deduction with anything but thirdness, nor induction with anything but 2ns. I myself have never been able to think of deduction as anything but thirdness, nor induction as anything but 2ns, and I think that I mainly have stuck to that way of thinking because when, in methodeutic, Peirce employs the three categories together in consideration of a "complete inquiry"--as he does, for example, very late in life in *The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God* in the section the CP editors titled "The Three Stages of Inquiry" [CP 6.468 - 6.473; also, EP 2:440 - 442]--he *explicitly* associates abduction (here, 'retroduction' of the hypothesis) with 1ns, deduction (of the retroduction's implications for the purposes of devising tests of it) with 3ns, and induction (as the inductive testing once devised) with 2ns. But again, as these particular categorial associations apparently proved confusing even for Peirce, constituting one of the very few tricategorial matters in which he changed his mind (and, then, back again!), I too will at least try to leave the question undecided (for now). Best, Gary
-- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey word press blog 1: http://jonawbrey.wordpress.com/ word press blog 2: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
