Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: Beyond Experiment • Scott Church

Names are not important of course, except for the purpose of communication.  The important thing is for us to distinguish hypothesis formation from hypothesis evaluation.  Now, there happens to be a long tradition of using the word abduction to distinguish that former, most incipient stage of inquiry and I think it serves communication to preserve that tradition.

Concepts, hypotheses, and theories have to be formed, logically speaking, before they can be evaluated.  In complex inquiries extending over long periods of time, formation, evaluation, and re‑formation will of course proceed in cascades of parallel and series operations, but the analytic distinction between elements and mixtures is still worth its salt.

The role of ab‑, de‑, in‑duction in the cycle of inquiry is discussed a bit further in the following article.

• Inquiry

Resources

• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Re: Beyond Experiment • Scott Church

Let me just say again that abduction is not “inference to the best explanation”.  That gloss derives from a later attempt to rationalize Peirce’s idea and it has led to a whole literature of misconception.  Abduction is more like “inference to any explanation” — or perhaps adapting Kant’s phrase, “conceiving a concept that reduces a manifold to a unity”.  The most difficult part of its labor is delivering a term, very often new or unnoticed, able to serve as a middle term in grasping the structure of an object domain.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Re: Peter Woit • Beyond Experiment

I have no horse in this race (cat in this box?) as far as multiverses and polycosmoi go.  I will limit myself to clearing up popular confusions about Peirce’s concept of abductive inference.

Analytic philosophy swayed many people into thinking science could be reduced to purely deductive reasoning, eliminating induction and ignoring abduction, but Peirce was a practicing scientist who worked outside that warp.  In his model of the inquiry process abduction is at root logically prior to any discussion of probabilities, however true it may be that all three modes of inference work in tandem to advance any moderately complex investigation.

The following article has more information on the history and function of abductive inference.

• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy

See especially the following sections.

• Types of Reasoning in C.S. Peirce
• Aristotle’s “Apagogy” • Abductive Reasoning as Problem Reduction

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Re: Peter Woit • Beyond Experiment

The phrase “inference to the best explanation” was coined by Gilbert Harman in his attempt to explain abductive inference but it conveys the wrong impression to anyone who takes it as a substitute for the whole course of inquiry rather than just its starting point.  Peirce himself was always very clear about this.

Bayes’ theorem is a deductive identity which adds no information to the observed data, nor is that its job.  It adds no rows or columns to the matrix of contingencies nor makes the observations populating its cells.  Those are jobs for the independent capacities of abductive and inductive reasoning.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Re: Peter Woit • Beyond Experiment

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the requirement of falsifiability.  At root it is simply the idea that an empirical law is not a logical tautology.  I don’t see any reason to dispense with that just yet.  In practice the principle affords us leverage only when we have two or more theories competing to describe the same domain.

Another thing that needs to be understood is that no reasoning from Bayes’ theorem nor any inference from probabilities has anything to do with the initial abduction, which takes us from a state of unquantifiable uncertainty to the first hypothesis of a conceptual framework, model category, or reference class.  It is only after those choices are made that speaking of probabilities becomes possible.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Re: Peter Woit • Beyond Experiment

Peirce is simply describing the process by which we seize on an initial hypothesis or model.  That choice will in practice be influenced by all sorts of previous experiences with the phenomenon in question but in principle our choice can be very wild indeed, revealed in a dream or stepping off a bus or whatever it may be.

The only real test of the hypothesis or model comes by way of the deductive consequences following from it and the inductive confirmations or falsifications following those.  The word abduction is a clumsy but traditional translation of Aristotle’s apagoge from Prior Analytics 2.25.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Functional Logic • Inquiry and Analogy
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems
• Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems
• Inquiry Driven Systems • Inquiry Into Inquiry

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)