Anderson on Peirce's Concept of Abduction

Robert}. Roth

Anderson on Peirce's Concept of Abduction: Further Reflections Douglas Anderson's recent article on Peirce's theory of abduction is both informative and thought-provoking.1 As he indicates at the beginning of the article, he deals with two questions: the evolution of Peircean abduction and its basis for scientific creativity as both insight and inference. The latter problem is particularly interesting for it confronts the critics of abduction who would claim that it excludes logical analysis, that it is fundamentally intuitionistic, and that Peirce confuses the logical with the psychological. The author makes skillful use of the relevant texts and in the main presents' a strong case for his own position. While I myself am persuaded by Anderson's arguments, I do feel that there are other aspects of abduction which deserve consideration in order that it may be better understood. At the same time, such a consideration may raise additional nervous questions and open the way for further objections on the part of Peirce's critics.2 The aspects of Anderson's position which I would like to explore may be stated in two propositions which he discusses: (1) abduction is an animal instinct, but (2) this does not entail a mechanical or biological reduction of the abductive process, for "Peirce believes that there must be a reason behind the conjecture made by abduction and for him this presupposes some rational control of the process by the scientist" (pp. 152-153). The purpose of this paper is briefly to describe Anderson's defense of these propositions and to indicate in what sense the defense, while on target, stands in need of further development. I That Peirce held abduction to be an animal instinct is beyond dispute and Anderson marshals the pertinent texts to substantiate this point. The basic problem which Peirce was trying to solve was

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how the scientist can hit upon a hypothesis which would be sufficient to explain a given happening in nature. Where does he begin? How does he narrow down his options? As Peirce states: Think of what trillions of trillions of hypotheses might be made of which one only is true; and yet after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis. By chance he would not have been likely to do so in the whole time that has elapsed since the earth was solidified. (5.172)3 Peirce indulges in a bit of fancy here for he asks how we could exclude as explanations the conjunctions of the planets or some chance word of mystical power pronounced by the dowager empress of China or even the presence of some invisible jinnee. In another place, he adds other possible explanations such as the day of the week on which the phenomenon occurred, the blue dress worn by the scientist's daughter, his dream of a white horse the night before, or the fact that the milkman was late that morning (5.591). Fanciful indeed, but it is Peirce's attempt, however maladroit, to make a point. He refuses to have recourse to chance. He admits that one cannot give "any exact reason for his best guesses" and he refers to some "magical i faculty" (5.173, 6.476). Bu£_^it appears to me that the clearest state/i ment we can make of tha logical situation - the freest from all questionable admixture - is to say that man has a certáiri Insight, not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right, into the Thirdness, the general elements, of Nature*^^¿.,173). In other places he calls this faculty a natural light, (a light of nature^, instinctive insight, genius, or il lume natural? appealed to by Galileo and undoubtedly employed by Kepler, Gilbert, Harvey, and Copernicus (5.604, 6.477, 1.80). But basically and in the last analysis abduction is an instinct similar to that found in the animal kingdom. Peirce uses the example of the pecking instinct in chickens. You cannot seriously think that every little chicken, that is hatched, has to rummage through all possible theories

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until it lights upon the good idea of picking up something and eating it. On the contrary, you think the chicken has an innate idea of doing this; that is to say, that it can think of this, but has no faculty of thinking anything else. (5.591) But if we attribute instinct to animals, why should we deny it to humans? And here, I believe, it is necessary to go beyond Anderson's treatment of abduction as instinct and to introduce an aspect of Peirce's position which the author does not mention. It is the evolutionary process which is at the basis of Peirce's whole philosophy. Evolution in relation to abduction is mentioned briefly by Peirce when he argues that chance cannot explain how the scientist narrows down the trillions of possible explanations to a workable few. How do we explain this ability? i You may produce this or that excellent psychological ; account of the matter. But let me tell you that all the ,' psychology in the world will leave the logical problem just where it was. I might occupy hours developing that point. I must pass it by. You may say that evolution accounts for the thing. / don't doubt it is evolution. But as for explaining evolution by chance, there has not been time enough. (5.172 Italics added) The connection between abduction as instinct and evolution is briefly mentioned here. But I believe it is crucial. In other places, Peirce wrote at length about evolution and his development is complex. He discussed the theories of Darwin and Lamarck and used the terminology of tychistic, anancastic, and ágapastic evolution (1.13-1.17, 1.103-1.109, 6.287-6.317).4 For the present discussion, it is sufficient to note that for Peirce the human mind is a part of nature and has emerged by the same evolutionary process. Consequently there is a connaturality between mind and cosmos which means that the mind has an affinity with nature, is attuned to it, and has "a natural adaptation to imagining correct theories of some kinds,

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and in particular to correct theories about forces." In short, the instincts conducive to assimilation of food, and the instincts conducive to reproduction, must have involved from the beginning certain tendencies to think truly about physics, on the one hand, and about psychics, on the other. It is somehow more than a figure of speech to say that nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which, when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature. (5.591) For Peirce, evolution develops neither by chance (tychism) nor by necessity (anancism) but by creative love (agapism). As Vincent Potter states: Consequently, the universe is not as the mechanistic philosophers would have it. It is not governed solely nor principally by the laws of dynamics. It is governed by reasonableness working itself out in the concrete. It has an intrinsic and immanent finality which cannot be reduced to the interaction of blind forces. In this context, then, mind and nature develop together. Nature, as it were, implants in the mind seeds of ideas that will mature in accordance with nature, "Man's mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he has discovered. It is the very bedrock of logical truth" (6.476). From all this it follows that abduction is not only linked with instinct but in turn it is also the result of an evolutionary development which explains both the biological origin of humans and their ability to form hypotheses in logic. II The second proposition which I have selected from Anderson's article states that abduction as instinct is not a mechanical or biological reduction of the abductive process. This means that it does not immediately and always select the correct hypothesis nor does it make its

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selection automatically. Even instincts in animals make mistakes. Abduction narrows the field of hypotheses to be considered. As Anderson points out, citing Peirce, abduction is a "fair guess" (2.623), an "extremely fallible insight" (5.181), "not strong enough to be oftener right than wrong, but strong enough not to be overwhelmingly more often wrong than right" (5.173). The tightness or wrongness of the hypothesis is to be determined by induction. But more importantly the selection of hypotheses is not automatic. Thus Anderson states that "Peirce believes there must be a reason behind the conjecture made by abduction and for him this presupposes some rational control of the process by the scientist" (pp. 152-153. See 5.108). But what could that rational control be? I am afraid that Anderson does not adequately answer the question, or perhaps better, Peirce himself is deficient on this point. Anderson refers to one text to show that abduction does not begin de novo but is influenced by previous thoughts and funded experience. Peirce's statement is as follows: "But the stimulus to guessing, the hint of the conjecture, was derived from experience" (2.755). This is a very brief and inconclusive text and I am not sure that it contains all that Anderson would like to attribute to it. Yet he makes a good point in stressing funded experience as a prerequisite for creativity. Even William James, who is often accused of being an extreme relativist in his theory of knowledge, emphasized the importance of old opinions in reaching solutions to new problems. The new idea is grafted upon the old stock with the least amount of change. The new idea mediates between the old and new experience. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modifications, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrée explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolution in an individual's beliefs leaves most of his old order

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standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. John Dewey, too, could be mentioned in this context. As a matter of fact, Anderson suggests that the move from funded experience to hypothesis is similar to Dewey's viewpoint. It is at least questionable whether a similarity between Peirce and Dewey can be drawn from the above text of Peirce. I myself suspect that Peirce would agree with Dewey but the agreement is not clearly stated. In any case, Dewey, while not calling the hypothesis-forming process an instinct, has stated more clearly than Peirce how the hypothesis is formed. For Dewey, a problem arises out of an organized situation or experience which is beginning to disintegrate, to become unraveled, as it were. Things were going along smoothly until some new element arises which puzzles us because it does not seem to fit into our experience. Then even prior to conscious reflection, the parts of the experience strive toward «integration and it is this which initiates the logical process. As a result, a suggestion enters the mind spontaneously, it ~~~ pops into the mind. "It flashes upon us. There is no direct control of its occurrence; the idea just comes or it does not come; that is all that can be said."^ In Dewey's view, the occurrence of the suggestion is not intellectual; it is what we do after its occurrence that we call / intellectual. And of course what we do is to put the hypothesis to / the test. Again, in describing a disturbed situation, Dewey speaks of "intuition." He puts the word in quotation marks because by it he does not intend an act of the mind which is a priori without any relation to experience. "Intuition" is that meeting of the old and new in which the readjustment involved in every form of consciousness is effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of

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revelation; although in fact it is prepared by long and slow incubation. Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain. In any case, the background of organized meanings can alone convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous. When old and new jump together, like sparks when the poles are adjusted, there is intuition. This latter is thus neither an act of pure intellect in apprehending rational truth nor a Crocean grasp by spirit of its own images and states.8 In Dewey's view, both observed facts and ideas are operational and dynamic resulting in a series of interactions. Some facts point to an idea as a possible solution; the idea in turn prompts more observation. This interaction continues until the elements of the disorganized experience are brought into harmony and a satisfactory solution to the original problem is reached.9 If my analyses of Peirce and Dewey are correct, it can be seen that Dewey says both less and more than Peirce. He says less because ultimately he leaves unanswered the question regarding the origin of the tendency of the mind to form appropriate ideas. Humans are products of evolution but they are not ends which evolution has been striving to reach. They are merely termini resulting from the chance combinations of biological forces. This is what Peirce would call tychism. But Dewey claims that once the human mind emerges, it is capable of projecting aims and goals with the result that purpose enters into nature. On the other hand, Dewey describes more fully the procedure by which a solution is reached. He had the advantage of being acquainted with the "new psychology" of the day and he was in a better position to give a fuller account of the creative imagination. He attempted to incorporate this information into his logic, philosophy, and educational theory. At the same time, he did not allow logic and a theory of knowledge to collapse into a psychological description of mental processes. Neither did Peirce, and Anderson rightly defends

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him against his critics on this point (pp. 161-162). Finally in my view both the Peircean and Deweyan positions are illuminating. But each taken by itself is inadequate and leaves important questions unanswered. A more fruitful explanation could be found in a synthesis of both positions. As indicated at the outset, my purpose was to bring out other aspects of Peirce's philosophy in order to view his theory of abduction from a broader perspective. One may very well deny that all this is necessary for a proper understanding of abduction. I myself believe it is. At the same time, my own reflections may provide more ammunition for Peirce's critics who would seriously challenge his theory of evolution and especially finality. These objections would have to be confronted because evolution and finality .are essential elements of Peirce's science, philosophy, and even of his logic. Fordham University

NOTES 1. Douglas R. Anderson, "The Evolution of Peirce's Concept of Abduction," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 22 (1986), pp. 145164. 2. The reader's attention is called to the article of Timothy Shanahan, "The First Moment of Scientific Inquiry: C. S. Peirce on the Logic of Abduction," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 22 (1986), pp. 448-466. While not specifically addressing Anderson's article, Shanahan brings out other features of Peirce's theory of abduction, i.e., its instinctual basis, instinct and its adaptive value, synechism, laws of nature and God's thought. My own treatment concentrates on instinct and finality as important elements in abduction. 3. All references to Peirce are taken from The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-35,1958). 4. See the fine treatment of this aspect of Peirce's thought by Vincent G. Potter, S. J., Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), Part III, Chap. 1, "Evolutionary Love." 5. Potter, Charles S. Peirce, p. 190. See 1.204. 6. William James, Pragmatism and Other Essays (N.Y.: Washington Square Press, 1963), pp. 29-30. See also pp. 37, 95, 97, 103.

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7. John Dewey, How We Think, tf^á/ffl (N.Y.: ftytyHeath and Company, 1933), p. 109. 8. John Dewey, Art as Experience (N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934), p. 266. 9. For a more extended treatment of Dewey's theory of logic, see my John Dewey and Self-Realization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962), Chap. VII, especially pp. 135-138. Specifically I argue that Dewey, without realizing it himself, intimated that nature exhibits a directed striving and that the cosmos is in tune with human drives and ideas. Both mind and nature cooperate in the attempt to achieve these ideals. However, in his explicit statements Dewey does not admit this.

Charles S. Peirce Logic and the Classification of Sciences Beverley E. Kent Closely examining both published and unpublished writings of Peirce and carefully attending to the chronological development of his systems of classification, Kent shows how seeming contradictions in Peirce's evolving classification of logic are really part of an increasingly clear position. $32.50

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