Abstract
After all these years of extensive discussion, Peircean abduction is still puzzling to us. One of the most pressing issues in understanding abduction is whether it is an instinct or an inference. For many commentators find it paradoxical “that new ideas and hypotheses are products of an instinct (or an insight), and products of an inference at the same time”.
This chapter was originally published as Woosuk Park (2012), “Abduction and Estimation in Animals”, Foundations of Science, 17(4), 321–337.
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Notes
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Not to mention his brilliant discussion of Peirce’s poor chicken, I am encouraged by Magnani’s reminder that there are many issues related to abduction that “are of great interest to historians of philosophy” (Magnani 2009, p. 280).
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Paavola refers to CP 7.220, (1901); HP 2:900–901, (1901); CP 5.591, (1903).
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For example, he quotes the following passage from Peirce: “When a chicken first emerges from the shell, it does not try fifty random ways of appeasing its hunger, but within 5 min is picking up food, choosing as it picks, and picking what it aims to pick. That is not reasoning, because it is not done deliberately; but in every respect but that, it is just like abductive inference”. Magnani confers on the article “The proper treatment of hypothesis: a preliminary chapter, toward an examination of Hume’s argument against miracles, in its logic and in its history” (1901). Another example could be the following discussion: “An example of instinctual (and putatively “unconscious”) abduction is given by the case of animal embodied kinesthetic/motor abilities, capable of leading to some appropriate cognitive behavior; Peirce says abduction even takes place when a new born chick picks up the right sort of corn. This is another example, so to say, of spontaneous abduction—analogous to the case of some unconscious/embodied abductive processes in humans (Magnani 2009, p. 276).
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It is of course an important matter for Magnani himself whether he is going “beyond” Peirce or not. See Magnani (2009, p. 221).
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Here Magnani quotes extensively from Peirce’s Carnegie application of 1902 (MS L75). Cf. Arisbe Website (http://members.door.net/arisbe/). We should note that Magnani is fully aware of the fact that we can find many instances where Peirce allowed abductive instinct to humans even in scientific reasoning. For example, Hypothesis selection is a largely instinctual endowment of human beings which Peirce thinks is given by God or related to a kind of Galilean “lume naturale”: “It is a primary hypothesis underlying all abduction that the human mind is akin to the truth in the sense that in a finite number of guesses it will light upon the correct hypothesis” (Peirce 1931–1958, 7.220; Magnani 2009, p. 277).
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For the first point, Magnani actually quotes from Peirce: “Thought is not necessarily connected with brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colours, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there” (Peirce 1931–1958, 4.551). On the other hand, for the second point, he again quotes from Peirce: [instincts are] “inherited habits, or in a more accurate language, inherited dispositions” (Peirce 1931–1958, 2.170; Magnani 2009, p. 278).
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This interpretation of Magnani’s strategy seems to be supported strongly by his explicit announcement: “I can conclude that instinct versus inference represents a conflict we can overcome simply by observing that the work of abduction is partly explicable as a biological phenomenon and partly as a more or less “logical” operation related to “plastic” cognitive endowments of all organisms” (Magnani 2009, p. 267).
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I am indebted to this point by an anonymous reviewer. For further discussion of this complicated issue, please see Magnani (2009, pp. 18–19).
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“Philosophy itself has for a long time disregarded the ways of thinking and knowing of animals, traditionally considered “mindless” organisms. Peircean insight regarding the role of abduction in animals was a good starting point, but only more recent results in the fields of cognitive science and ethology about animals, and of developmental psychology and cognitive archeology about humans and infants, have provided the actual intellectual awareness of the importance of the comparative studies” (Magnani 2009, p. 283).
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“Sometimes philosophy has anthropocentrically condemned itself to partial results when reflecting upon human cognition because it lacked in appreciation of the more “animal-like” aspects of thinking and feeling, which are certainly in operation and are greatly important in human behavior” (Magnani 2009, p. 283).
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According to Black, a human estimative faculty was posited in addition to the intellect “in order to account for a variety of complex human judgments that are pre-intellectual but more than merely sensible” (Black 2000, p. 59).
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As Black points out, Avicenna uses these examples in almost all his discussions of internal senses. For references to Avicenna’s particular texts, see footnote 9 of Black (1993, p. 247).
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For example, in Duns Scotus we an interesting text where various meanings of term “intention” are recognized in the context of explaining the intentionality of light in the medium: (1) an act of the will, (2) the formal reason of a thing, (3) a concept, (4) what ‘intends’ toward the object (McCarthy 1976, p. 26).
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Black points out that Avicenna uses “the language of judgment and control” for this role of estimative faculty (Black 2000, p. 61). Else where she describes the relation of the estimative faculty to “the other internal sense-powers, particularly the common sense” by a slightly different list: “the language of control, disposal, employment, etc” (Black 1993, p. 227).
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The corresponding endnotes 77 and 78 of Black (2000) should be read together with this quote.
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English translation in the text is adopted from Barad (1995, p. 95). Original Latin text is as follows: Judicat enim ovis videns lupum eum esse Fugiendum naturali judicio, et non libero, quia non ex collation sed ex naturali instinctu hoc judicat.
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Park, W. (2017). Abduction and Estimation in Animals. In: Abduction in Context. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48956-8_5
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