Peircers,
Gary brings us evidence that Peirce continued to find favor with his "original
opinion"
about the "connections" of the three categories with the principal types of
signs and
the principal types of inference, even when all the second guessing and third
guessing
had settled down, and yet leaves the question undecided in his own mind at that
time.
Working from the understanding that all semiotic phenomena are irreducibly
triadic,
taking "irreducibile" in the strictest sense of the word, specific reasons must
be
given for assigning any number less than 3 to the arity of any aspect or
component
of a semiotic species, for example, a type of sign relation or a type of
inference,
in effect, exhibiting an approximate reduction in some looser sense of
"reduction".
There are plenty of examples in Peirce's early work where he demonstrates the
form
of reasoning that he uses to make these categorical associations and
connections,
and I had intended to go hunt a few of these up, but the niche of the web where
I last copied them out is down right now, so I will have to try again later.
Regards,
Jon
CL = Cathy Legg
GR = Gary Richmond
CL: 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.
GR: 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:
CSP: 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 Induction split, at once,
into the
Sampling of Collections, and the Sampling of Qualities.
CSP, ''Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking :
The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism'', Turrisi (ed.), 276-277.
GR: Shortly after this he comments on his brief period of "confusion" in the
matter.
CSP: [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].
GR: [You can also read the entire deleted section by googling
"At the time I first published this division of inference"
and 'Peirce'.]
GR: So, as he sees here, for those few years Peirce was "confused" about
these categorial associations. In that sense Peirce 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:
GR: "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.
GR: 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.
GR: 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).
--
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 [email protected] with the
line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the
list, send it to [email protected]
