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ABDUCTED_LOGIC

                                             December 6, 2011

                                           http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/

                                                 This is the kind of
   Consulting the often excellent                work that I suspect
   "Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy"          gives wikipedia an
   on Charles S. Peirce...                       inferiority complex.

   "Prior to about 1865, thinkers on logic commonly
   had divided arguments into two subclasses: the
   class of deductive arguments (a.k.a. necessary
   inferences) and the class of inductive arguments
   (a.k.a. probable inferences). About this time,
   Peirce began to hold that there were two utterly
   distinct classes of probable inferences, which he
   referred to as inductive inferences and abductive
   inferences (which he also called hypotheses and
   retroductive inferences)."

   This is good stuff...  The author
   does a nice job of clearly
   explaining a coherent worldview            I hesitate to say he's
   consistent with Peirce's writings.         nailed down Peirce's
                                              worldview, just because
      Deduction:                              Peirce's scattered
                                              writings make it difficult
      All A are B,                            to check.
      C is an A,
      then C is a B.

                      Induction:

                      All A are B,
                      C is a B,
                      then C is likely an A


                                    Abduction:

                                    C is an A,
                                    C is a B,
                                    could it be, all A are B?


   On my first encounter with
   the term "abduction" I
   couldn't figure out what it       DEWEY_PIERCE
   was supposed to mean.
                                            Though that was a random
                                            paper from Someone On The
                                            Net, not original work by
                                            Peirce.


  More from the SEP article:

  "... for Peirce, induction in the most basic sense is
  argument from random sample to population."

  As for "abduction":

  "... it is a form of probable argument entirely
  different from both deduction and induction. It
  has the air of conjecture or 'educated guess'
  about it. This new type of argument Peirce called
  hypothesis (also, retroduction, and also,
  abduction)."

     It makes perfect sense reading through
     this argument... calling an inductive
     probability a "hypothesis" might be
     regarded as too extreme, since we really
     already regard it as probably true,
     it requires no leap of insight to get
     to it.

        Using conventional terminology,
        some hypotheses may be "induction"
        but not all are.



The notion of "habit formation",
the tendency to repeat what you did last time,         That was another thing
apparently ties in to the idea of evolving             I thought confusing:
physical law:  maybe nature looks constant
just because it likes to repeat itself,                    THE_PEIRCE_HABIT
but is not bound to repeat itself, and
hence may very well change at any moment.

In section 5, "Anti-determinism, Tychism, and Evolution"
there's some interesting material making the distinction
between "habit" and "deterministic law", the point being
that behavior in the face of habit is not invarying.
Actual physical measurements, and presumably physical
"law" are probabilistic.

                                                     Tychism foreshadows
                                                     quantum mechanics?

                            (January 12, 2014)

         This breakdown of "intuitive leaps"
         into multiple classes might be a
         first step toward formation of rules
         of thumb in estimating the level of
         trust to place in intuition...

         (Might there be an
          intuition continuum?)



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