C. S. Peirce on Intuition

[Matt Faunce]

C. S. Peirce on Intuition

(First draft)

C. S. Peirce, b. 1839 - d. 1914, did some good seminal work on what we call
“intuition”. Here are three references for the historian of science.

o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o

Charles Sanders Peirce, in the “Collected Papers, 6.66-69 (volume VI,
§66-69), through a short series of deductions from basic principles, shows
that there’s a very good reason to believe that there’s more to causation
than just the Aristotelian efficient cause. He explains that facts are
abstractions from an overall event as represented by true propositions;
cause and effect are two facts; and, a cause is nothing more than the rule
that produces the result which we call the effect. The cause-effect
relation is Natures syllogism. Acceleration is determined by plotting three
points in time over a distance. From those three points, given a mass, the
force is determined. Knowing the force and mass, given the latter two
points in time you can deduce the first point in time. This last deduction
can accurately be interpreted as the latter fact in time, viz., the latter
two positions, being the cause of the earlier point. He concludes, “In
short, so far as phenomena governed by the law of the conservation of
energy are concerned, the future determines the past in precisely the same
way in which the past determines the future; and for those cases, at least,
it is a mere human and subjective fashion of looking at things which makes
us prefer one of those modes of statement to the other.”

Peirce, elsewhere, champions the idea that there is a form of final-cause
active in the universe, where an ideal state calls upon and pulls previous
states of things toward itself. Christoph Sigwart, in the final chapter of
his magnum opus, Logic, also proposed that a teleology is active in the
universe.

o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o

In many of Peirce’s writings, he analyzed inference into three modes: (1)
abduction, (2), deduction, and (3) induction.
1. Abduction is the guessing of a hypothesis.
2. Deduction is the drawing of necessary consequences from a given premise.

3. Induction is the testing of the verity of the hypothesis.

In Manuscript 692, he explains the mystery of abduction: that guessing a
correct hypothesis happens more often than pure random guessing can
reasonably be believed to allow. Since abduction cannot be guided by
deduction or induction, there’s nothing known to man that can explain its
rate of success. I transcribed portions of his manuscript (from a fax of
his handwriting) and posted it on Usenet. Here’s a link.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.philosophy.debate/c/JgDKor7PVbo

o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o

C. S. Peirce with Joseph Jastrow, in their paper, On Small Differences in
Sensation, proved the human ability to process subliminal information, that
we react correctly to subliminal information—information that we don't even
know that we are experiencing—more often than chance allows.

Joseph Jastrow wrote that the experiment demonstrated "that traces of
sensory effect too slight to make any registry in consciousness could none
the less influence judgment."

The last paragraph in the study says this:

"This general fact has highly important practical bearing, since it gives
new reason for believing that we gather what is passing in one another's
minds in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not fairly
aware of having them, and can give no account of how we reach our
conclusions about such matters. The insight of females as well as certain
"telepathic" phenomena may be explained in this way. Such faint sensations
ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by
every man." –Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow (1885), On Small
Differences in Sensation

o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o~~~o

Tying the three ideas together, perhaps we are able to sense the subliminal
pull of a final cause, and this sense is the source of accurate hypotheses.


--
Matt

[Matt Faunce]

C. S. Peirce on Intuition

(Second Draft, perhaps rougher than the first)

C. S. Peirce, b. 1839 - d. 1914, did some good, seminal work on what we
call “intuition”. Here are three references that I think are related in the
way I describe in §4.

————————————§1————————————

Charles Sanders Peirce, in the Collected Papers, 6.66-69 (volume VI,
§66-69), through a short series of deductions from basic principles, shows
that there’s a very good reason to believe that there’s more to causation

than just the Aristotelian efficient cause. He explains that a fact is a
true propositions which represents an abstraction from an overall, real
event; a particular cause and its effect are two facts; and, a cause is

nothing more than the rule that produces the result which we call the

effect. The cause-effect relation is Nature’s syllogism. Isaac Newton gave
us the equation, force = mass × acceleration. In another paper, Peirce
explains why we need to understand this equation as an equation rather than
a cause-effect flow in the sense where cause precedes effect. In physical
causation, the process of change is often measured by acceleration.
Acceleration of an object is determined by plotting the object at three

points in time over a distance. From those three points, given a mass, the
force is determined. Knowing the force and mass, given the latter two
points in time you can deduce the first point in time. This last deduction

can accurately be interpreted as the latter two points in time, with their
known force, causing, i.e., being the rule which determines, the first and

earlier point. He concludes,

“In short, so far as phenomena governed by the law of the conservation of
energy are concerned, the future determines the past in precisely the same
way in which the past determines the future; and for those cases, at least,
it is a mere human and subjective fashion of looking at things which makes

us prefer one of those modes of statement to the other.” –C. S. Peirce, CP.
6:69

Peirce, elsewhere, argues for the idea that there is a form of final-cause

active in the universe, where an ideal state calls upon and pulls previous
states of things toward itself. Christoph Sigwart, in the final chapter of
his magnum opus, Logic, also proposed that a teleology is active in the
universe.

————————————§2————————————

In many of Peirce’s writings, he analyzed inference into three modes: (1)
abduction, (2), deduction, and (3) induction. 1. Abduction is the guessing
of a hypothesis. 2. Deduction is the drawing of necessary consequences from
a given premise. 3. Induction is the testing of the verity of the
hypothesis.

In his Manuscript numbered 692, he explains the mystery of abduction: It’s
evident by mankind’s rate of discovering new scientific laws that guessing

a correct hypothesis happens more often than pure random guessing can

reasonably be believed to allow.. On any single question abduction is not
guided by deduction or induction. Also, on any question that’s new to
mankind inherited genetic or social habits cannot be relied on for a direct
answer or for an answer on how to narrow down the number of possible
answers. So, for every new question in the course of mankind there are
innumerable possibilities to guess from. Yet, man’s rate of guessing
correctly is higher than what luck can reasonably be believed to allow. How
is it possible? I transcribed portions of his manuscript from a fax of his
handwriting, and posted it on Usenet. Here’s a link.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.philosophy.debate/c/JgDKor7PVbo

Here’s an example of the problem. You feel a poke in the back, and ask
what’s causing it. None of your guesses will be that it’s a book on your
bookshelf, 15 feet away, or any other far away object. Q. But, how did you
eliminate that class of objects? A. We have a habit of first looking for
the answer in the immediate vicinity of the feeling. This habit is backed
by the reason that a feeling of touch is always caused by an object that’s
close enough to touch the person feeling it. Q. But, how was that
reasoning discovered so the habit could be established? A. The habit that
follows the reasoning was passed down to us, socially and genetically. We
learn the reasoning by observing our own habits. Q. But, how did this
chain of inheritance start? How did our first ancestor in this chain find
the reason to establish that habit when he had innumerable possibilities to
guess from? A. Uhhhh, I don’t know.

This problem led some of the brightest ancient philosophers to think that
all knowledge must be inherent in our minds, and all we need to do is clear
away ungodly thinking and the answer will naturally appear. Charles Peirce
had a not very dissimilar answer, in his MS 692:

“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 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.”

Maybe I can do better. Q. How did our first ancestor in this chain find
the reason to establish that habit when he had innumerable possibilities to
guess from? A. I suppose that his primitive mind could only think of a few
of the innumerable possible answers for any one of his many problems, but
also, his primitive mind could only see a few of the many problems he had.
This problem which you ask about happened to be one which corresponded to
one of the few answers his mind could think of. With a small number of
conceivable problems and a manageable number of conceivable answers, among
which was the right answer to one of his known problems, all he needed was
persistence and luck. Basically, he had a hammer, screwdriver and ax, with
which tried to solve all of the problems which he could mentally understand
(which weren’t many). Most of his problems could not be solved, but with
persistence he was bound to get a lucky strike with trying to solve this
one problem. His guess to only look near himself for causes of touch gave
him success which he used over and over, giving him knowledge which he
taught to his descendants who after many generations developed the habit as
a genetic trait.

Q. You said, “This problem which you ask about happened to be one which
corresponded to one of the few answers his mind could think of.” Do small
numbers of conceivable problems happen to correspond with a small number of
conceivable answers more than luck can allow? A. No. I think they evolve
together. Q. Why do you think that? A. Uhhhh, I don’t know, but it smells
right.

Q. When Kepler discovered that Mars’s orbit is an ellipse, was was this
discovery bound to happen because of his persistence? A. I think so. The
atmosphere was such that it allowed this question to arise (but not all the
other questions which will arise many years later) as well as knowledge of
the existence of ellipses and ways to eliminate whole classes of guesses,
leaving a manageable number of possible answers to this question. Q. So in
the history of science, questions arise along with access to the answer
which lies in a manageable pool of what can be considered for possible
answers? A. I think so. An atmosphere that’s conducive for the rise of a
question can last thousands of years before an answer is found, e.g.,
Zeno’s questions and modern answers, but no caveman ever asked, “Is our
sun, or any mass in the universe big enough that if it dies its gravity is
so strong that none of the material of which it’s composed will be able to
resist collapsing into a mathematical point?” That question and knowledge
of the existence of the elements which can be put together to make the
answer, along with ways to narrow down the field of possible answers, arose
in a modern atmosphere, because of the modern atmosphere.

————————————§3————————————

C. S. Peirce with Joseph Jastrow, in their paper, On Small Differences in

Sensation, proved the human ability to process subliminal information and
react correctly to it more often than chance allows. (Subliminal
information is information that we don’t consciously know that we are
experiencing.) Peirce and Jastrow, one at a time, hooked each other up to
an apparatus which applied pressure, to the fingertip of the test subject,
which either ‘increased then decreased’ or ‘decreased then increased’. The
test subject had to say which one occurred after each of the many trials.
He also had to mark his confidence level. When the differences were so
small that the subjects marked their confidence level as zero, they were
nonetheless correct three out of five times. This result is significantly
better than what pure guessing would have yielded, viz., being correct one
out of two times.

Joseph Jastrow wrote that the experiment demonstrated "that traces of
sensory effect too slight to make any registry in consciousness could none
the less influence judgment."

The last paragraph in the study says this:

"This general fact has highly important practical bearing, since it gives
new reason for believing that we gather what is passing in one another's
minds in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not fairly
aware of having them, and can give no account of how we reach our
conclusions about such matters. The insight of females as well as certain
‘telepathic’ phenomena may be explained in this way. Such faint sensations
ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by

every man." –Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow, On Small Differences
in Sensation (1885)

————————————§4————————————

§4. To the question of what guides abduction, perhaps we can draw on both
the Peirce-Jastrow Experiment and Peirce’s analysis of causation and give
the answer that we are able to sense the subliminal pull of a final cause
(pulling us from the infinite future.)

There’s a phenomenon called “blind sight.” Some blind people are able to
subliminally sense objects whose light hits their eyes. For example, when
walking through a hallway which has objects in their way, they can maneuver
around these objects without needing to touch them first. One explanation
is that their eyes receive the light and send the information to a part of
the brain which the person can’t consciously access, but which can and does
direct action; so such actions feel to be done instinctively or intuitively
rather than deliberately for a known reason. Perhaps all of us have sensory
information from each one of our senses sent to that part of the brain, and
that we all are intuitively guided if we tune into it. Scientists tell us
that friction is an electrical phenomenon. I suppose this means that the
sense of touch is an electrical sense. Perhaps every object has an
electrical field or somehow reacts with our electrical field, and so we can
subliminally feel (by the sense of touch) objects at a distance, if we are
able to tune into it. Perhaps we have another sense, a sixth sense, which
only sends information it receives to the part of the brain which the
person can’t consciously access, but which can direct action if we’re tuned
into it.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"This is trite."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Yeah, it's really not too much.