Abduction and Other Minds

One of the most intriguing mysteries in American philosophy falls under the question: “Just what does Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of abductive reasoning comprise?” Peirce used the terms “abduction” and “retroduction” interchangeably as names for a distinct form of logical inference, as well as for the method by which hypotheses are engendered. He considered his theory of abduction essential to his theory of pragmatism. Yet nearly a century after his death, Peirce’s concept of abduction is still poorly understood. This entry (...) will explore the two distinct meanings of the intertwined concepts that Peirce variously called “abduction” and “retroduction.” One meaning refers to a distinct form of logical inference; the other, to the form of a deliberate and overarching logical method which incorporates abduction, deduction, and induction for its full performance. If modern researchers were to accept this proposed separation of Peirce¹s terminology to identify these different levels of concepts within his notion of abduction, we could finally begin the task of developing effective operational definitions for abduction and retroduction. These definitions would take us a long way toward solving the “mystery” about what Peirce meant by his concept of abduction and toward making “right reasoning” a teachable skill. (shrink)

It may seem obvious that, before we can begin to verify a hypothesis, we must somehow “acquire” one. Yet, until Peirce began working on his theory of abduction, little thought had been given to the issue of hypothesis acquisition and its everyday equivalent goal acquisition. Even today, most people seem satisfied with the idea that goals and hypotheses arise “somehow,” and that the primary purpose of scientific inquiry is to verify a hypothesis; and, of ordinary life, to achieve goals. The (...) idea of a normative method by which hypotheses should be formed belongs to Peirce. Here we will be loosely applying the mental construct of John Dewey’s “means-end continuum” as a heuristic device for explaining the differing ways in which hypotheses can be constructed‹and the way in which, according to Peirce, they “should be” constructed. Dewey’s means-end continuum enables demonstration of the differences between goal-directed and means-directed hypothesis construction. The following discussion will be addressing the aspect of goal-acquisition habits in everyday life, and of hypothesis construction in formal logic in terms of the ways in which these relate to means-directed and goal-directed processes. (shrink)

Optimism may not seem like a topic with which good scientific minds need bother themselves. After all, it would seem that neither optimism nor pessimism should have anything to do with the neutral and objective performance of good scientific reasoning. Science is usually thought of as a collection of disciplines from which well-trained minds seek actual truths‹not an arena for seemingly psychological factors such as “optimism” and “pessimism.” Yet if so, then why would Charles Sanders Peirce, perhaps the consummate scientific (...) mind of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even bother to deal with the issues of optimism and pessimism, as he does in his 1908 Monist article on reasoning: “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God?” What is more, why would such a prodigious scientific mind insist upon the necessity of an attitude as an essential component of the performance of the most important aspect of his theory abductive reasoning? Although it may not seem so at first glance, the case for optimism as a necessity for abductive reasoning is a strong one, and not in the least psychologistic. For optimism is a spacious filter through which a greater number of options can become available for consideration, than when any form of pessimism is in place. (shrink)

The Peircean idea of interpretation as an inferential process of hypothesis adoption reveals a suprising anticipation of the account of interpretation deployed by Davidson in his article “A nice Derangement of Epitaphs”. For Davidson, the process of interpretation is a transformation of “prior theories” into “passing theories”. In the following I want to point out the similarities between the Davidsonian and the Peircean model of interpretation by highlighting the crucial role that the interpreter´s “abductive competence” plays in the process of (...) communication. (shrink)

According to Kant, human stupidity reveals, a lack of “power of judgement”, or as Peirce might say, a lack of abductive competence that confuses the relevant and the irrelevant. Peirce anticipated this idea. He writes: “I have come to the conclusion that it is folly to attempt to set limits which human stupidity cannot overpass. Apparently both, Semiosis and human Stupidity are unlimited. The only two possible reactions to this condition humain are either critical reasoning or laughing. It was Aristotle (...) who first defined man as at the same time animal syllogans and as animal ridens: an animal that can reason and that can laugh. I want to highlight a particular aspect of this very general double determination, namely the relation between the Peircean logic of abduction and the Freudian “logic” of the comic. (shrink)

According to C. S. Peirce, abduction is a rational attempt to locate an explanation for a puzzling phenomenon, where this is a process that includes both generating explanatory hypotheses and selecting certain hypotheses for further scrutiny. Since inference is a controlled process that can be subjected to normative standards, essential to his view of abductive rasoning is that it is correlated to a unique species of correctness that cannot be reduced to deductive validity or inductive strength. This irreducibility claim is (...) of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods, but it is not clear that Peirce produced a convicing argument for it. To the contrary, when the full structure of abductive argumentation is clarified, especially as presented in Peirce’s later writings on the topic, a good case can be made for viewing every inferential step in the abductive process as dissolving into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, hypothesis-selection is a special type of practical inference that, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, hypothesis-generation, is not inferential at all. Once this is understood, it emerges that the familiar descriptions of abduction as “inference to the best explanation” or as a process of “belief revision” are, at best, misleading. (shrink)

Direct Perception is the view that we can see others' mental states, i.e. that we perceive others' mental states with the same immediacy and directness that we perceive ordinary objects in the world. I evaluate Direct Perception by considering whether we can see intentions, a particularly promising candidate for Direct Perception. I argue that the view equivocates on the notion of intention. Disambiguating the Direct Perception claim reveals a troubling dilemma for the view: either it is banal or highly implausible.

In his oft-cited book Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio claims that Descartes is responsible for having stifled the development of modern neurobiological science, in particular as regards the objective study of the physical and physiological bases for emotive and socially-conditioned cognition. Most of Damasio’s book would stand without reference to Descartes, so it is intriguing to ask why he launched this attack. What seems to fuel such claims is a desire for a more holistic understanding of the mind, the brain and (...) the self. For Descartes however, here allowed to answer back, the question of accounting for the whole diversity of human potential experiences was what could not be left out of sight. Concerning the question of his neglect of the mind said to be "abysmally" detached from the body, it is claimed here that, in the light of Descartes' move which was to break with the scholastic practice of putting more and more things under the control of the soul, the program of using the reality of embodiment to understand the mind was one he actually started. An answer is also suggested to counter the charge that Descartes failed to account for the interaction of the two substances, the mind and the material body, by showing why and how Descartes actually believed in the substantial union of mind and body. Yet, he kept in the picture an ingenium, a faculty of pure understanding overarching a cybernetic model of the body-mind, of which we also here seek to appreciate the significance. This project of accounting for the mind-body interaction ended-up in a study the "passions," as emotions were then called. (shrink)

There has been recent interest in the hypothesis that we can directly perceive some of each other’s mental features. One popular strategy for defending that hypothesis is to claim that some mental features are embodied in a way that makes them available to perception. Here I argue that this view would imply a particular limit on the kinds of mental feature that would be perceptible (§2). I sketch reasons for thinking that the view is not yet well-motivated (§3). And I (...) present an alternative, epistemological strategy (§4). The epistemological strategy is to discern which features of our environment are perceptible by reflection on our capacity to identify them. If the epistemological strategy is accepted it becomes plausible that we sometimes directly perceive some of each other’s mental features. But it becomes implausible to suppose that our perceptual access is limited in the way the embodied view would imply. I end by sketching reasons to think that we sometimes directly perceive each other’s desires (§5). (shrink)

Our knowledge of each others’ mental features is sometimes epistemically basic or non-inferential. The alternative to this claim is Inferentialism, the view that such knowledge is always epistemically inferential. Here, I argue that Inferentialism is not plausible. My argument takes the form of an inference to the best explanation. Given the nature of the task involved in recognizing what mental features others have on particular occasions, and our capacity to perform that task, we should not expect always to find good (...) inferential explanations of our knowledge. This conclusion is an epistemological one. The motivation for it is independent of metaphysical concerns about functionalism or about the best way to model the cognitive architecture which produces our knowledge of others’ minds. Given this it is compatible both with the truth of functionalism and theory–theory construed as a cognitive model. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

In this paper I discuss Searle's claim that the computational properties of a system could never cause a system to be conscious. In the first section of the paper I argue that Searle is correct that, even if a system both behaves in a way that is characteristic of conscious agents (like ourselves) and has a computational structure similar to those agents, one cannot be certain that that system is conscious. On the other hand, I suggest that Searle's intuition that (...) it is “empirically absurd” that such a system could be conscious is unfounded. In the second section I show that Searle's attempt to show that a system's computational states could not possibly cause it to be conscious is based upon an erroneous distinction between computational and physical properties. On the basis of these two arguments, I conclude that, supposing that the behavior of conscious agents can be explained in terms of their computational properties, we have good reason to suppose that a system having computational properties similar to such agents is also conscious. (shrink)

The question of what it means to be aware of others as subjects of mental states is often construed as the question of how we are epistemically justified in attributing mental states to others. The dominant answer to this latter question is that we are so justified in virtue of grasping the role of mental states in explaining observed behaviour. This chapter challenges this picture and formulates an alternative by reflecting on the interpretation of early joint attention interactions. It argues (...) that the standard picture is committed to an implausible account of children's awareness of the co-attender's focus of attention. On a more natural interpretation, children engaged in joint attention perceptually recognize the co-attender's attitude to some object, as something like the (correct) answer to the question of what the object is like. The developmentally basic case is not that of attributing mental states as the causes of observed behaviour but of understanding perceived attitudes and actions as appropriate responses to the shared world. The chapter concludes by exploring how this developmental claim bears on mature adult knowledge of other minds. (shrink)

Robert Pargetter has argued that we know other minds through an inference to the best explanation. My aim is to show, by criticising Pargetter's account, that this approach to the problem of other minds cannot, as it stands, deliver the goods; it might be part of the right response to the problem, but it cannot be the whole story. More precisely, I will claim that Pargetter does not successfully reconstruct how ordinary people in everyday life come reasonably to believe in (...) other minds, given only the gross behavioural evidence actually available to them. I will suggest, contrary to both Pargetter in particular and this approach in general, that reference to one's own case does, after all, play an indispensable evidential role in the justification of belief in other minds, something which obviously marks an important disanalogy between the case of other minds and that of such theoretical entities as electrons. (shrink)