ONT Re: OCA: Re: Aristotle's Approximation
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CSP = Charles Sanders Peirce
HP = Howard Pattee
JA = Jon Awbrey
JA, quoting CSP:
| Admitting, then, that the question of Pragmatism is the Question of Abduction,
| let us consider it under that form. What is good abduction? What should an
| explanatory hypothesis be to be worthy to rank as a hypothesis? Of course,
| it must explain the facts. But what other conditions ought it to fulfill
| to be good? The question of the goodness of anything is whether that
| thing fulfills its end. What, then, is the end of an explanatory
| hypothesis? Its end is, through subjection to the test of
| experiment, to lead to the avoidance of all surprise and
| to the establishment of a habit of positive expectation
| that shall not be disappointed. Any hypothesis,
| therefore, may be admissible, in the absence of any
| special reasons to the contrary, provided it be capable
| of experimental verification and only in so far as it is
| capable of such verification. This is approximately the doctrine
| of pragmatism. But just here a broad question opens out before us.
| What are we to understand by experimental verification? The answer to that
| involves the whole logic of induction. Let me point out to you the different
| opinions which we actually find men holding today, perhaps not consistently, but
| thinking that they hold them, upon this subject. (LOP 1903, 250; CP 5.197-198).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce,
|'Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking',
| The 1903 Harvard 'Lectures on Pragmatism' (= LOP 1903),
| Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1997.
HP: This sounds perfectly normal, but why is Peirce given so much credit for this "normal" view?
Obviously, induction is important too, but "any hypothesis" is not generally "admissible".
What is missing in this approximate doctrine is mention of the aesthetic elements of
explanations: simplicity, beauty, fecundity, etc., and clues for "distinguishing
this beauty from merely formal attractiveness ... a test so difficult that it
may baffle the most penetrating scientific minds" (Polanyi).
Does he now get a lot of credit for this? Then that is certainly an improvement
over when I began to study it, when all the usual suspects were going on about
"inference to the best explanation" and "bayesian hypothesis generation" --
the horror, the horror -- and Stalnaker wrote a book on 'Inquiry' that
omitted to mention Peirce's name even once. In a sense, all Peirce
did was to revive after long neglect Aristotle's triadic picture
of the three kinds of inference contributing to inquiry, against
the reductions of previous generations of Bacons and Mills, not
to mention Kant's "proof" that it all boils down to deduction.
So there was a bit a boldness to that, then, of course, the
courage to spend the rest of one's life sharpening up old
Aristotle's axe and working to build a new house of logic.
But when you read Peirce's lectures and papers, from 1865
to this one in 1903, you get the sense that he is simply
reflecting on the "normal" practice of his scientific
acquaintances and colleagues, and doing little more
than trying to render a bit more explicit the norms
that he and all of them have always already been
living by, against the eyeless idols of prior
pretense as to how it's supposed to be done.
And so it goes.
Jon Awbrey
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