Peirce’s Demon Abduction: How to Charm the Truth out of a Quark

Abstract

It is apparent to the most casual student of Peirce that he was fascinated with, if not obsessed by, the ‘logic of discovery’, as he called it. In fact, a large part of his pragmatic philosophy and phenomenological speculation (5:195) was centred in this core problem of the study of logic. Deductive processes are fairly obvious once one recognises semantic relationships and syntactic operations, and inductive processes are the stuff of a good part of human experience; so analytic and synthetic propositions suggest themselves easily in a logician’s quest. But human experience also provides a not-so-neat process of information handling: the hunch, the guess, the intuition, the insight, the eureka, the revelation, the enlightenment, the inspiration, the Voice, the satori,¹ and so on. Our sensory experience, although trained in cultural time, provides a whole range of data, appropriately called ‘raw data’, which must be processed by methods based on previous knowledge, on the already known, but how is it that one discovers what one does not know? If experience is our teacher (as Peirce and most of us seem to think), then how do we learn lessons which deal with new material and new experiences? How can we know about what we don’t already know? How do we gain new information when information is a matter of the sign’s perspective in the first place?

What is now proved was once only imagin’d.

Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’