C. S. Peirce, Excerpts from MS 692

[Matt Faunce]

C. S. Peirce, Excerpts from MS 692

pages 13-14:

"Now our percepts and direct observations relate exclusively to the
circumstances that happened to exist when they were made, and not to any
future occasion in which we might be in doubt how to act. Consequently,
observed facts do not, in themselves, contain any practical knowledge; and
in order to attain such knowledge, additions must be made to the data of
perception. Any proposition added to the percepts, tending to make those
data illuminate other circumstances than those under which they were
observed, may be called a hypothesis. For instance, it is a hypothesis that
thirteen of the present United States were former colonies of Great
Britain. For it cannot be directly observed. All that we can observe is
that it is so asserted in books and tradition, and that a few monuments of
diverse kinds support the assertion."

pages 25-31:

"Any novice in logic may well be surprised at my calling a guess an
inference. It is equally easy to define inference so as to exclude or
include abduction. But all the objects of logical study have to be
classified; and it is found that there is no other good class in which to
put abduction but that of inferences. Many logicians, however, leave it
unclassified, as sort of logical supernumerary, as if its importance were
too small to entitle it to any regular place. They evidently forget that
neither deduction nor induction can ever add the smallest item to the data
of perception; and, as we have already noticed, mere percepts do not
constitute any knowledge applicable to any practical or theoretical use.
All that makes knowledge applicable comes to us via abduction. Looking out
my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no!
I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see.
That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not
proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible
in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but
what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in
a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our
knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by
induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the
stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

"When a chicken first emerges from the shell, it does not try fifty random
ways of appeasing its hunger, but within five minutes is picking up food,
choosing as it picks, and picking what it aims to pick. That is not
reasoning, because it is not done deliberately; but in every respect but
that, it is just like abductive inference. In man, two broad instincts
common to all animals, the instinct for getting food, and the instinct for
reproduction, are developed into some degree of rational insight into
nature. The instincts connected with getting food require that every animal
should have some just ideas of the action of mechanical forces. In man
these ideas become abstract and general. Archimedes and Galileo make right
guesses about mechanics almost at once. Only a few of their notions have to
be rejected, because they know how to do their guessing piece-meal and in
an orderly sequence. Out of their guesses, corrected by induction and
deduction, the science of dynamics has been built. Guided by the ideas of
dynamics, physicists have guessed at the constitution of gases, the nature
of heat and of sound, and experiment has only corrected errors and measured
quantities. By analogous processes, on science suggesting ideas for
another, the whole physical side of our theoretical knowledge has grown up
out of the original seed of the food instincts.

"The instincts connected with reproduction require that every animal should
have some tact and judgment as to how another animal will feel and act
under different circumstances. These ideas likewise take more abstract
forms in man, and enable us to make our initial hypotheses successfully in
the psychical side of science, – in such studies, for example, as
psychology, linguistics, ethnology, history, economics, etc.

"It is evident that unless man had some inward light tending to make his
guesses on these subjects much more often true than they would be by mere
chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated for its utter
incapacity in the struggles for existence; or if some protection had kept
it continually multiplying, the time from the tertiary epoch to our own
would be altogether too short to expect that the human race could yet have
made its first happy guess in any science. The mind of man has been formed
under the action of the laws of nature, and therefore it is not so very
surprising to find that its constitution is such that, when we can get rid
of caprices, idiosyncrasies, and other perturbations, its thoughts
naturally show a tendency to agree with the laws of nature.

"But it is one thing to say that the human mind has a sufficient magnetic
turning toward the truth to cause the right guess to be made in the course
of centuries during which a hundred good guesses have been unceasingly
occupied in endeavoring to make such a guess, and a far different thing to
say that the first guess that may happen to possess Tom, Dick, or Harry has
any appreciably greater probability of being true than false.

"It is necessary to remember that among the swarms who have covered the
globe, there have not been above these individuals, Archimedes, Galileo,
and Thomas Young, whose mechanical and physical guesses were mostly correct
in the first instance.

"It is necessary to remember that even those unparalleled intelligences
would certainly not have guessed right if they had not all possessed a
great art of so subdividing their guesses as to give to each one almost the
character of self-evidence. Thus, the proof by Archimedes of the properties
of the lever, which makes the foundation of the whole science of mechanics,
is composed of a series of abduction, or guesses. But look at the character
of those guesses. He begins by saying that equal weights freely hanging
from the extremities of an equal-armed balance will be in equilibrium. That
was a mater of familiar knowledge; at least when the two weights were
suspended at equal distances from the balance. But Archimedes guessed that
the length of the suspending thread would make no difference, otherwise
than by its own weight." [Peirce continues, describing the orderly sequence
of Archimedes' piece-meal guesses.]

--
Matt