I guess you just have a different experience of thinking than I do. — T Clark
Yes. Another thought is that when reasoning, there are moments of 'microintuitions'. They can be all sorts of things - moments of feeling into semantics, the 'I have checked that enough' qualia, 'it feels like some step is missing here' qualia, tiny thought experiments where one circles around a step in reasoning, quick dashes into memory looking for counterevidence and so on. All these little tweaks and checks. — Bylaw
Right? — Pantagruel
deduction, induction and abduction — Bylaw
In the philosophical literature, the term “abduction” is used in two related but different senses. In both senses, the term refers to some form of explanatory reasoning. However, in the historically first sense, it refers to the place of explanatory reasoning in generating hypotheses, while in the sense in which it is used most frequently in the modern literature it refers to the place of explanatory reasoning in justifying hypotheses. In the latter sense, abduction is also often called “Inference to the Best Explanation.”
This entry is exclusively concerned with abduction in the modern sense, although there is a supplement on abduction in the historical sense, which had its origin in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce — SEP - Abduction
The term “abduction” was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce in his work on the logic of science. He introduced it to denote a type of non-deductive inference that was different from the already familiar inductive type. It is a common complaint that no coherent picture emerges from Peirce’s writings on abduction. (Though perhaps this is not surprising, given that he worked on abduction throughout his career, which spanned a period of more than fifty years. For a concise yet thorough account of the development of Peirce’s thoughts about abduction, see Fann 1970.) Yet it is clear that, as Peirce understood the term, “abduction” did not quite mean what it is currently taken to mean (see Campos 2011 and McAuliffe 2015). One main difference between his conception and the modern one is that, whereas according to the latter, abduction belongs to what the logical empiricists called the “context of justification”—the stage of scientific inquiry in which we are concerned with the assessment of theories—for Peirce abduction had its proper place in the context of discovery, the stage of inquiry in which we try to generate theories which may then later be assessed. As he says, “[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.172); elsewhere he says that abduction encompasses “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered” (CP 5.590). Deduction and induction, then, come into play at the later stage of theory assessment: deduction helps to derive testable consequences from the explanatory hypotheses that abduction has helped us to conceive, and induction finally helps us to reach a verdict on the hypotheses, where the nature of the verdict is dependent on the number of testable consequences that have been verified. (As an aside, it is to be noted that Gerhard Schurz has recently defended a view of abduction that is again very much in the Peircean spirit. On this view, “the crucial function of a pattern of abduction … consists in its function as a search strategy which leads us, for a given kind of scenario, in a reasonable time to a most promising explanatory conjecture which is then subject to further test” (Schurz 2008, 205). The paper is also of interest because of the useful typology of patterns of abduction that it puts forth.)
As Harry Frankfurt (1958) has noted, however, the foregoing view is not as easy to make sense of as might at first appear. Abduction is supposed to be part of the logic of science, but what exactly is logical about inventing explanatory hypotheses? According to Peirce (CP 5.189), abduction belongs to logic because it can be given a schematic characterization, to wit, the following:
The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
But Frankfurt rightly remarks that this is not an inference leading to any new idea. After all, the new idea—the explanatory hypothesis A—must have occurred to one before one infers that there is reason to suspect that A is true, for A already figures in the second premise.
Frankfurt then goes on to argue that a number of passages in Peirce’s work suggest an understanding of abduction not so much as a process of inventing hypotheses but rather as one of adopting hypotheses, where the adoption of the hypothesis is not as being true or verified or confirmed, but as being a worthy candidate for further investigation. On this understanding, abduction could still be thought of as being part of the context of discovery. It would work as a kind of selection function, or filter, determining which of the hypotheses that have been conceived in the stage of discovery are to pass to the next stage and be subjected to empirical testing. The selection criterion is that there must be a reason to suspect that the hypothesis is true, and we will have such a reason if the hypothesis makes whichever observed facts we are interested in explaining a matter of course. This would indeed make better sense of Peirce’s claim that abduction is a logical operation.
Nevertheless, Frankfurt ultimately rejects this proposal as well. Given, he says, that there may be infinitely many hypotheses that account for a given fact or set of facts—which Peirce acknowledged—it can hardly be a sufficient condition for the adoption of a hypothesis (in the above sense) that its truth would make that fact or set of facts a matter of course. — SEP - Pierce on Abduction
No but often it seems that very different perspectives on the mind do suggest that some people do have fundamentally different experiences of thought. — Pantagruel
I think that's true, but I don't think a difference in the experience means there is a difference in the mechanisms or processes of thought among different people. — T Clark
Ok. But if experience is empirically contingent, then there must be some empirical differentiator? Even if it is like the same light shining on two differently coloured plates. The plates absorb different spectrums of the light, so are experiencing very different aspects of the same thing. (Which reflects in the colours they reflect.) — Pantagruel
Thinking, from the perspective of an individual is (IMO) almost always strategic and goal driven. — Bret Bernhoft
But standards of rationality change. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Greece. The slave Epictetus was a Stoic, which makes sense. But then so was Marcus Aurelius. So rejection of an argument at a social level could be the institution of a new rational standard — Pantagruel
The tricky thing about intuition is that we don't know whether these processes of comparison, measurement etc.,have gone on subconsciously. — Janus
I wasn't so much concerned about intuition missing anything, but more about the implicit rational thinking that might have been going on sub-consciously when we find that an intuitive response has suddenly appeared in our consciousness. — Janus
I tend to react to the words this way also. Rationality seems focused, even if it is on the fly or just in the head, on (intended to be) logical verbal processes, whereas reason seems to mean something processes of good thinking, whatever they are like. I don't tend to keep the terms separate and I think others will not have this way of separating them, but I do have a dash of that tendency myself.Maybe the difference between reason and rationality is that reason welcomes intuition and insight into the process. — T Clark
If thinking is strategic, is it therefore also rational? Is it possible to be a criminal, and also rational, in the strictest sense of the word? What about reasonable? — Pantagruel
I don't tend to keep the terms separate and I think others will not have this way of separating them, but I do have a dash of that tendency myself. — Bylaw
Though I want to add that those rational processes of further testing need to use intution right through. They are not just intuition, but the process relies on it. — Bylaw
Continuing this approach, having a reason versus having a rationale. A reason is offered as causally sufficient and self-evident. I used metal to build this wheel instead of wood so it will last longer. A rationale is an internally coherent explanatory framework which is invoked precisely when there is no exemplary reason. I do not know where I dropped my watch, so I chose to search for it under the streetlamp because there is more light there. A rationale is invoked as a reason when no more specific reason exists. — Pantagruel
I think it is possible to be criminal and also rational in the case that the law is irrational. — Benj96
Which is not to say they are morally equivalent.
now — T Clark
If thinking is strategic, is it therefore also rational? Is it possible to be a criminal, and also rational, in the strictest sense of the word? What about reasonable? — Pantagruel
I was thinking of a criminal. Who can have high situational-awareness and make complex plans. But is that sufficient to rationality? — Pantagruel
You are proposing that intuition includes some sort of secret logic we are not aware of. — T Clark
I see two possibilities. 1) There is no secret rational component to intuition. And 2) It doesn't matter one way or the other. Let's start with 1. In my experience, intuition works by making non-rational connections between unlike ideas. That's consistent with reading I've done that claims that fundamental mental processes work by making analogical, metaphorical connections rather than linear ones. I'm not capable of taking that argument any further at this point, so we'll leave it at that. — T Clark
On to 2. It seems clear to me that rational processes are ones we have to be conscious, aware, of. They have to be put into a language, possibly mathematics or logic. It is the essence of reason that it has to be transparent. — T Clark
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