ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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Note 22
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CP 7.162-255. The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents (1901)
CP 7.183-188. The Logic of Science
CP 7.188. [Surprise]
| Perhaps there will here be no harm in indulging in a little diagrammatic psychology
| after the manner of the old writers' discussions concerning the 'primum cognitum';
| for however worthless it may be as psychology, it is not a bad way to get orientated
| in our logic. No man can recall the time when he had not yet begun a theory of the
| universe, when any particular course of things was so little expected that nothing
| could surprise him, even though it startled him. The first surprise would naturally
| be the first thing that would offer sufficient handle for memory to draw it forth
| from the general background. It was something new. Of course, nothing can appear
| as definitely new without being contrasted with a background of the old. At this,
| the infantile scientific impulse, -- what becomes developed later into various kinds
| of intelligence, but we will call it the scientific impulse because it is science
| that we are now endeavoring to get a general notion of, -- this infantile scientific
| impulse must strive to reconcile the new to the old. The first new feature of this
| first surprise is, for example, that it is a surprise; and the only way of accounting
| for that is that there had been before an expectation. Thus it is that all knowledge
| begins by the discovery that there has been an erroneous expectation of which we had
| before hardly been conscious. Each branch of science begins with a new phenomenon
| which violates a sort of negative subconscious expectation, like the frog's legs
| of Signore Galvani.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 7.188
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