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DEWEY_PIERCE
February 11, 2010
I was trying to make sense of this paper by a
Phyllis Chiasson which uses some of Peirce's
ideas with some ideas by Dewey:
http://www.digitalpeirce.fee.unicamp.br/conchi.htm
The Peirciean notion under
discussion is interesting:
Hypothesis (or goal) acquisition takes
place via a process called "abduction"
(as opposed to deduction or induction)
Induction is the formation of general
principles from observation... one
might just call those principles
"hypotheses" that need to be tested.
So where's the difference between
induction and abduction?
Possibly they're placing emphasis on the fact
that you can really go in many directions here,
and choosing a particular hypothesis has a
goal-directed quality about it. What makes one
hypothesis interesting compared to another?
But similarly, amidst the chaos of sensory
experience and instrumental data (if
there's really a distinction), why seize
on one set of generalizations, rather
than another?
In practice, I think we would
probably say something like "this
is where intuition comes in", but
that's another way of saying we
don't quite know what we're doing.
In reading this paper, I think I was being tripped
up by an odd usage of "ends" and "means" which
come from Dewey's "ends-means continuum", which is
not something I'm familiar with.
Working it out on my own:
I don't immediately see why you would propose
a "continuum", though clearly a sharp distinction
between "ends" and "means" doesn't really hold up.
My first impulse would be to say that really actions
just have effects in general, and it's a matter of
perspective to categorize some of those effects as
the ultimate "ends", or the intermediate "means".
Actions have effects, some of those we classify as
desired, some we classify as "side-effects".
In general, any kind of
utilitarian calculus is going
to have to add up positive
results and subtract off the
price paid for undesireable. Perhaps radically
undesireable,
repugnant means.
Part of your end may
be to achieve it via
clean means.
It's interesting to consider that
the stated goal of an action might
be only an excuse, perhaps an
unconscious excuse. It's often Jonathan Stockwell, in a lecture I
noted that holding a tool heard in the early 80s, commented on
encourages the use of the tool-- the *lure* of playing spy... reading
other men's mail, far from being
This is another way in something gentleman are reluctant to do
which means blur into is actually irresistable to nearly
ends: One of your everyone given half an excuse.
goals may be to use
all available means.
"I have access to
a woodshop. What
can I do with that?" Still the notion of a
"continuum" seems peculiar.
To me, that suggests
and axis like this:
ends means
<--------o------>
Can you vary a parameter
to gradually shift from
an end to a means?
I think it might be an abuse
of the word, a presumption
the either you have separate
categories or a "continuum".
The author of this paper seems to be
asserting that both deduction and
induction are ends-directed, and
that abduction is means-directed.
Myself, I tend to regard deduction as "top-down"
and induction as "bottom-up", the author
seems to take induction as another kind of "top-down",
but regards abduction as an actual "bottom-up" process.
According to the author,
Peirce regarded induction
as a kind of sorting out No creation of new
of experience into categories in a flash
pre-existing categories. of insight is allowed?
(Jan 12, 2014)
The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosopy makes this
all clearer:
ABDUCTED_LOGIC
Deduction is certain reasoning from given abstracts.
Induction is fuzzier, reasoning using only one given
abstraction, and an uncertain leap to an individual
case.
Abduction is fuzzier still, a guess at the existence
of an abstraction from a few individual cases.
So, if you want to use a top-down
axis, induction ends up in the middle.
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