A Non-Polemical Discussion of Abduction

I recently discussed here the Peircean idea of 'abduction.' But I did so in a frankly polemical context, criticizing shoddy work by another writer who got the idea wrong or, rather, who did not get it at all but who failed to realize his loss.

Leaving such caviling aside, let me make an observation about the need for the idea. .

The idea arose because Peirce considered standard accounts of logic in his own day to be viciously circular. They relied on induction on the one hand and deduction on the other. Deduction has to give us the premises that make induction possible, and induction has to give us the premises that make deduction possible.

Take the famous syllogism about Socrates. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. The obvious problem here is that unless I know that Socrates is mortal, I don't know that all men are mortal. If exceptions are possible, then Socrates could be one of them. If I'm presuming that exceptions are not possible -- what have I accomplished by laying this out? Presumptions, as Bertrand Russell once said, are to proof what theft is to honest labor. [Or he said something like that -- I'm too lazy to look it up.]

Let us suppose that "Socrates" is our contemporary, living among us, and we are trying to decide whether he will die.

We intuitively want to say something like this: all men who were born more than 120 years ago have died. That gives us a copious database whence to draw a generalization. All men are mortal. Further, Socrates has all the characteristics that we need to classify him under the heading "man." Thus, both the major premise and the minor premise are empirical facts. Thus, from the conjunction of them, we get the conclusion, "Socrates is mortal."

But we've got a hidden premise here, "nature is uniform." Or, in temporal terms, "nature is constant." Anything that has been true of "all men" up until now will continue to be true of all men. How do we get that conclusion? Observation? No All observation will tell us is that in some respects nature is uniform and in other respects it is not. Europe based zoologists were for a long time perfectly justified in the belief that "all swans are white." They held that belief, rationally, until explorers came back from Australia with reports of black swans. Oops.

These considerations led Peirce to believe that induction and deduction alone could never escape from circularity. Induction offers generalities, deduction derives particulars, which in turn are used to build up the generalities, which lead us back down tot he particulars. Abduction was his solution to that problem -- a sort of logic that can stand on its own (leaving the other two as simply ways to illustrate or formalize what abductions allow us to know). As Peirce once wrote:

Looking out my window this lovely spring morning, I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I don't see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

That's why one can't punt on this.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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