I know Levi disagrees with how I read Derrida but if we can discount the question of how accurate is to Derrida the person and take it up merely as a philosophical conception I think it’s pretty useful.  I particularly love this take on four dimensionalism. (A topic I’ve taken up frequently here over the years)

First, insofar as substances have both temporal and spatial parts, no object will ever be fully present, because every object will contain parts that are elapsed or gone. This is a good candidate for articulating one of the meanings of withdrawal, and is one of the reasons I have claimed that the essence of objects consists in what Derrida called differance (I have an article forthcoming on this entitled “The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann and the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal”). Here differanceshould not be understood as the claim that beings take on their being in and through their difference from everything else (e.g., the thesis of Saussurean diacritics), but rather as the claim that 1) beings differ in-themselves in that they change (regardless of whether any other objects exist), and 2) that the presence of an object or substance is perpetually deferred by virtue of the fact that the past of a substance has always already disappeared and the future is necessarily open. Second, it follows that objects or substances can develop. Clearly, while my childhood is a temporal part of my being, I am physically, psychologically, and intellectually very different than I was at the age of three. Now I grow hairs in odd places. Finally, third, insofar as substances are temporal, they are open. To say that an object is open is to say that it’s internal structure is not fixed but that it can develop in unexpected ways in the future. If four-dimensionalism is true, I see no opposition between the processualists and onticology or object-oriented materialism (OOM).

It seems to me, at least from reading several of his posts of late, that many of the places I struggled with Harman are places where Levi adopts a position I find much more acceptable (or at least understandable).

I also really like that he refers to his own position as an object oriented materialism. Now materialism often is taken as an other term for physicalism or the idea that all reality is reducible to third person physics-like descriptions. Yet that’s hardly the only use of materialism. I consider myself a materialist yet I think the first person perspective is irreducible to a third person perspective the way many contemporary materialists do. (I’m a Peircean in that sense) Levi wants to say that a materialist is one who thinks “all entities are materially embodied, not that all entities are reducible to elementary parts.” This allows one to embrace various theories of emergence.

The one place I suspect I might differ from Levi (I’m not sure) is over my realism towards non-material entities. I make a distinction, following Peirce, between entities that are real versus entities that are actual. Thus to be actual is to be embodied as a material entity in space-time. However I am a realist towards various types of generals such as numbers, mathematical and so forth. As such I suspect I am, like Peirce, somewhat of a scholastic realist. My sense is that this might put me closer to Harman than Levi. But I may just not fully grasp the details of Levi’s position. I think some of the debate about withdrawn objects may relate to the notion of formal distinction in Duns Scotus which in turn pops up in Peirce (and perhaps Derrida).  (See this excellent blog post from Beyond Necessity on why haecceity is not repeatable for a way to think about this — I’ll leave undiscussed whether this relates to OOO)

I know Graham Harman got a bit upset when I suggested from my limited understanding that a lot of what I saw in OOO seemed presaged by Peirce. Unfortunately I fully confess to getting some things wrong about OOO when I first engaged it those years ago. Still while I don’t know OOO well enough to dare say Peirce said it all first (and I doubt that’s the case) it does seem like there is at least some similarity between the two types of thinking.

Related posts:

1. Peirce on Reference
2. The Derrida Debate
3. Peirce & OOP

THE PROBLEM OF EXTRA-SEMIOTIC ENTITIES

There is one particular problem that the semiotic conception of the universe raises, and which deserves special treatment here. It concerns the ontological status of existent entities, of the individual things that common sense insists are “out there,” external to all thought. The question may be put in the following terms: If all of reality is to be conceived in terms of semeiotic, as governed by the law of mind, does all of reality then have ontological status only as it enters into sign-action? One answer to this question has been proposed in the assertion by David Savan that Peirce was a “semiotic idealist.”" I contend that, whatever merit the theory of semiotic idealism may have, Savan is mistaken in attributing a version of it to Peirce.

First of all, our account of the internal structure of a complete symbol indicates that there must be elements of the universe that are not merely semiotic. Because a complete symbol requires indices and sinsigns, which are defined as individual existent things involved in dyadic relations to other existents, the answer to the question whether Peirce was a semiotic idealist is in one respect relatively simple. Although everything there is may potentially be a sign, not everything that has being is only a sign.24 There are nonsemiotic aspects to the universe, so it seems that Savan is right to say that Peirce rejected “strong” semiotic idealism: he did not maintain that “the very existence of any thing depends upon the system of signs, representations, and interpretations which purport to refer to it.”23 The catch is that a thing is a constituent part of reality only in so far as it would become an element of the complete symbol Peirce called the entelechy.

Savan characterizes Peirce as a “mild” semiotic idealist. This position maintains that “any properties, attributes, or characteristics of whatever exists depend upon the system of signs, representations, or interpretations through which they are signified.”"‘ The mild semiotic idealist accepts that there are independently existing things, but insists that their properties are determined by the sign-system in which they function (in Peirce’s case, that system is the process of evolution toward the perfectly real sign). Peirce did not adhere to strong semiotic idealism, which makes the extra-semiotic entities’ very existence depend upon the sign system. Savan finds the anti”semiotic idealist” position he calls “extreme realism” unacceptable, as well, and argues that Peirce likewise rejected it. Savan says that this position (let us call it extreme semiotic realism) “is of no interest to anyone who is in pursuit of understanding. For such a realist, whatever [apparent] knowledge and understanding human inquiry may attain, the truth may quite possibly be otherwise. Such a possibility can not be the goal or presupposition of I argue that, as unsettling as the position may be, Peirce’s logical :eafism implies just this form of extreme semiotic realism.

Peirce held that there are existent things, characterized predominantly by Secondness, independent of semiosis. This position is rooted in logic, which according to Peirce must hope (among other things) “that any given estion is susceptible of a true answer, and that this answer is discoverable, a being and being represented are different, that there is a reality, and that c real world is governed by ideas” (NEM 4:20). Here we see the joint sertion that there is objective truth and that metaphysics must suppose .c world to be governed by the law of mind. Peirce’s assertion in this passage that being and being represented are different can be understood to mean that existent things have ontological status independently of semiosis.

Note that both mild semiotic idealism and extreme semiotic realism Presume the existence of extra-semiotic individuals. This is necessary, as ‘,van points out, in order to account for the fact of surprising and compelling elements in experience.” Peirce’s theory of perceptual judgment requires the hypothesis of an independent external world. Perception, for Peirce, is a representation of some object by one’s present self to one’s future self, which interprets the object as a perceived event: “In a perceptual judgment the mind professes to tell the mind’s future self what the character of the present percept is” (CP 7.630). Now what gets represented in a perceptual judgment often comes without any warning, and enters the stream of cognition contrary to all expectation. I flip a light switch and experience a loud pop and darkness rather than the expected bright light. I have no controt over the process by which I represent these phenomena to myself, but he process is indeed describable in semiotic terms.

If we ask what the object of the perceptual judgment is, we come into murkey waters. We can identify no prior cognition that would have the perception of a loud pop and darkness as its proper interpretant. The only prior cognition of which we may have been aware would have had a representation of bright, room-filling light as its interpretant. The novel cognition must have come from somewhere, though, and all we can do is to suggest a hypothesis about what kind of object would generate this kind of surprising sign. Thus we embrace the metaphysical hypothesis that there is indeed a stem of individual enduring things, connected through dyadic reactions, which exist independently of semiosis. These extra-semiotic individuals are dynamical object of my perceptual judgment, and make their presence known in unexpected intrusions into the semiotic flow of cognition.

Independent existence, then, is hypothesized as the dynamical object of certain representations. Because existence is proposed as an object of representation, and because (following Peirce) we have rejected nominalism in lavor of logical realism, we must suppose there is some determinate truth about it which would be revealed as the final interpretant of a perfect reprewntation of that object. Here is where I part company with Savan. He argues that Peirce’s alleged “mild semiotic idealism” makes the characters (though not the existence) of the extra-semiotic world depend on the sign system. If it makes any sense to speak of truth in connection with the object of perceptual judgments, though, that truth must be objective in the sense that it does not depend upon our particular perceptions of it. The definition of truth deriving from Peirce’s logical realism makes truth independent of what any finite inquiry, or any finite process of semiosis, may happen to lead us to believe. A true interpretant would never be revised, because it would accord in all respects with the objectively determinate character of the object. There is an independent world of dyadic existence, we must suppose, and some parts of this world may not be incorporated into any sign until the end of semiosis. Their characters would not be known until that mythical moment, but they must be something independent of their representation: existence has the special characteristic “of being absolutely determinate” (CP 6.439). Until the end of semiosis and the realization of a perfect symbol, our knowledge of these characters very well might be radically mistaken.

In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce introduced his notorious example of the diamond that materializes and is utterly destroyed without ever having been perceived or tested for hardness. In that article, Peirce wrote that there would be “no falsity” in saying that the diamond is soft. Such modes of speech “would involve a modification of our present usage of speech with regard to the words hard and soft, but not of their meanings. For they represent no fact to be different than what it is; only they involve arrangements of facts which would be exceedingly maladroit” (CP 5.403). This might be taken to suggest that the existent thing that never enters the semiotic sphere does not have a determinate property of hardness, and is thus neither hard nor soft. As an inoculation against this interpretation, Peirce wrote in the 1905 “Issues of Pragmaticism”: “Remember that this diamond condition is not an isolated fact. There is no such thing; and an isolated fact could hardly be real. It is an unsevered, though presciss part of the unitary fact of nature” (CP 5.457). If it is anything but pure logical fiction, even in its relatively isolated state the diamond must enter into some dyadic relations with some other part of the world. There are, again, no absolutely isolated individuals or facts about individuals. The diamond’s existence must surely have some effect on its surroundings, and either its hardness or other properties associated with its hardness will leave a mark on the one determinate dynamical object that is the existent world. Though this effect, and hence the diamond’s hardness may remain unknown until the end of inquiry, Peirce insisted that at the end of inquiry, all information about the world would be represented in the perfect and all-encompassing entelechy. Short of that perfect state of information, though, we may well be ignorant or mistaken about any given character of existence.

Savan claims, again, that this extreme semiotic realism is of “no interest to anyone who is in pursuit of understanding,” because it allows that the truth “may quite possibly be otherwise” than what inquiry suggests.  Savan is correct to say that this ontology leaves the door wide open for all our present readings of the book of nature to be exposed as mistaken.  Though QUITE unlikely, it is just possible that we will discover there are no such things as fossils after all, but only bone-shaped rocks.  This is hardly a position of “no interest” to one who pursues understanding, however: it is a direct consequence of the principle of fallibilism.  Peirce balanced this skeptical strain with the affirmation that, after all, whenever we engage in rational thought we tacitly suppose that our thought is leading toward the truth in the long run, and that if there is indeed such a thing as truth, then all we need do is to persist in the methods of science to get close to it (SS 75).

(Kelly Parker, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought, 219 – 222)

(Any typos are mine)

Related posts:

1. Quick thoughts on OOP
2. The Problem of Fit
3. The Problem with Metaphysics

If I know that h is true, I know that any evidence against h is evidence against something that is true: so I know that such evidence is misleading. But I should disregard evidence that I know is misleading. So, once I know that h is true, I am in a position to disregard any future evidence that seems to tell against h. (Gill Harman, Thought 148)

Richard goes on to give some good rejoinders against the paradox. The usual one is to say that evidence has to be considered in terms of time. So at the time of new evidence the total evidence has to be considered when determining if someone knows something.

As Richard says,

You’re only justified in believing that “any evidence against h is misleading” insofar as you’re justified in believing that there isn’t any such (sufficiently weighty) evidence against h.

It’s important to realize that this sort of approach to epistemology really is looking at evidence in terms of evidence potentially considerable by a subject and seeing what the best possible justification would be in terms of this evidence. Epistemology thus concerns a kind of ideal knower rather than the way people actually go about considering evidence.

Needless to say this “ideal” situation is viewed as problematic by some. However I think it is useful for certain kinds of consideration even if I think it tends to get a bit too much attention at times within philosophy.

Allow me to add a different way of dismantling the paradox. This is more a Peircean approach. For Peirce the prime issue in belief and knowledge is that (1) our beliefs are not volitional and (2) we have a duty to inquire. Thus at any time we have an ethical duty to inquire into new evidence.

To say one “should” disregard evidence then becomes pointless because we have no choice on the matter. Either the evidence will be persuasive or not. Perhaps by some ideal epistemological judgment the evidence ought not be persuasive. But we are still bound to investigate and inquire. If we continue to inquire then eventually evidence for the truth will become persuasive.

It’s fair to ask why evidence might not be persuasive. For Peirce this is because there is a big difference between mere intellectual acknowledgement of justification and real belief. Real belief leads to behaviors entailed by that belief whereas mere acknowledgement doesn’t. The classic example along these lines would be scientists who intellectually knows some disease he’s experimenting with is dangerous but doesn’t act as if their samples were dangerous. Belief becomes a matter of degree.

In this scheme justification for a belief ends up being ideal ethical laws of behavior given some knowledge. However those laws must themselves become subject to belief in order to be justification for a person. Translated back into a more traditional epistemology what counts aren’t merely the pieces of evidence but the “logic” of how one puts those pieces of evidence together. Each piece of evidence must first be believed in order to be evidence and effectively this entails that the reasoning entailed by what most call evidence is itself evidence.

Now I don’t think Peirce objects to epistemological reasoning simply because it is a form of reasoning about reasoning. That is it is a type of inquiry into how we ought reason about evidence. As such it can be persuasive and significantly change how we consider evidence. The problem of epistemology is that it neglects the nature of belief considering an “ideal” human without competing wants, desires, projections, moods, or emotions. All of those come into play when considering both belief and justification as actually conducted.

I’d say that for a Peircean one could say evidence is misleading only in the sense that it is evidence that rationally ought be neglected when considering the evidence in toto. Which is really Richard’s approach.

Related posts:

1. Knowledge: Why Do You Draw the Line?
2. Evidence
3. What is a Trump?

I take it that in order for something to qualify as robustly real it has to be characterized by independence or an ability to exist in its own right without depending on the existence of another.

Peirce has something quite similar.

An abstraction is something denoted by a noun substantive, something having a name; and therefore, whether it be a reality or whether it be a figment, it belongs to the category of substance, and is in proper philosophical terminology to be called a substance, or thing….

An abstraction is a substance whose being consists in the truth of some propositions concerning a more primary substance.
By a primary substance I mean one whose being is independent of what may be true of anything else. Whether there is any primary substance in this sense or not we may leave to the metaphysicians to wrangle about.

By a more primary substance I mean one whose being does not depend on all that the being of the less primary substance does, but only a part thereof.  (CP 4:161-2)

Now one place I think Peirce differs from Levi is that Peirce sees himself as a scholastic realist. That is he thinks not only existing things are real but also there are real generals.  The way he gets around the obvious problems with such a view is the distinction between finite and infinite semiosis.  Something is real if it doesn’t depend upon what any finite group thinks.  While Peirce did consider real substances early in his thought he quickly moves away from them thinking that Substance and Being are the unthinkable limits of his categories.  (i.e. the source and end of semiosis)  By limits he means something analogous to limits in calculus such as you learn in High School when doing derivatives.

Related posts:

1. Derrida and Universals
2. Musings on Matter
3. Morris vs. Peirce

But Peirce did not conceive science in that way, nor would he agree that the “wasteland” of modern times is properly or profitably diagnosed as being due to the development of the sciences, though he might very well agree that the conception of science which has reigned in modern times–often shared alike by its opponents and its advocates–has more than a little to do with it. (6)

Footnote 6: As regards the way Peirce conceives the relationship of science and technology, I will only remark here that although it is true that, in his view, any successful theoretical science yields a technology of some sort as a by-product, Peirce does not equate scientific and technological (“calculative”) thinking in the way Heidegger does. I address this topic myself, from the perspective of the conception of objectivity, in “Semiotic Objectivity”, Semiotica 26:3/4, 1979, pp. 261-288)), reprinted in Frontiers in Semiotics (ed. Deely, Williams, and Kruse, Indiana University Press, 1986).

Now I have to confess I’ve never read this further paper of Joe’s.  So I may be getting him (Joe) quite wrong.  Still, let me address what I think ends up being a tad more complex than it first appears.

Heidegger’s conception of the essence of science (which isn’t necessarily the same as science of course) as gestell is quite famous.  Science does reduce nature into a standing reserve and this is why the essence of science (gestell) is not something science can find.  This standing reserve is calculative or “an economy” but what is key is that is something available for humans.

Now of course Peirce has a conception of science that attempts to divorce it from any sentimentality at all.  To care is to cease doing science for Peirce.  So at a first glance the interpretation of a huge gap between the two is understandable.

For Heidegger though gestell (enframing or the essence of technology) is a kind of gathering together that allows things to be revealed.  It’s a revealing through a kind of framework or assembly.  This is often taken in Kuhnian terms as a kind of paradigm.  Yet Kuhn brings with him a kind of instrumentalism in which things are for uses.  Heidegger, despite how he is often portrayed, just isn’t interested in this.  Heidegger does not say that modern science is technological.  (Which is what Joe claims)  Rather Heidegger’s claim is just that science is a way of revealing the world.  And the way science reveals is things as objects.  This lets technology treat things as objects to be manipulated.

I’d argue though that Peirce’s conception of the sign with the distinction between immediate and dynamic object is very much caught up in Heidegger’s notion of enframing.  Further I think that Peirce also ends up with a view more similar to Heidegger than some might think.

Let us look upon science — the science of today — as a living thing. What characterizes it generally, from this point of view, is that the thoroughly established truths are labelled and put upon the shelves of each scientist’s mind, where they can be at hand when there is occasion to use things — arranged, therefore, to suit his special convenience — while science itself, the living process, is busied mainly with conjectures, which are either getting framed or getting tested. When that systematized knowledge on the shelves is used, it is used almost exactly as a manufacturer or practising physician might use it; that is to say, it is merely applied. If it ever becomes the object of science, it is because in the advance of science, the moment has come when it must undergo a process of purification or of transformation.  (CP 1:234)

Note the distinction between what science enables (which he presents as analogous to technology) and what he presents as the essence of science itself.  The whole section on science I quote from above is quite interesting and unfortunately often neglected relative to Peirce’s phenomenology.  It’s available online as well.

This isn’t to say we can’t see differences.  For Peirce, “Science consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth with intentness in the eye, with energy in the arm.”  That is it is wrapped up with a desire to unveil.  For Heidegger it is much more about a way of organizing to let things unveil.  That’s a subtle but I think important difference.  For Peirce the difference between science and non-science is much more akin to Heidegger’s conception of authentic and inauthentic – especially as tied to Das Man.

The life of science is in the desire to learn. If this desire is not pure, but is mingled with a desire to prove the truth of a definite opinion, or of a general mode of conceiving of things, it will almost inevitably lead to the adoption of a faulty method; and in so far such men, among whom many have been looked upon in their day as great lights, are not genuine men of science;

However in order to know something not known one will in effect be restructuring the elements of knowledge.  So I think a corollary to Peirce’s conception is Heidegger’s notion of gestell.  But I don’t see much evidence that Peirce gets at anything like Heidegger’s gestell or even Kuhn’s paradigm.  It’s true that Peirce adopts a semiotic that can be considered holistic.  But a lot of the elements of this interrelatedness simply aren’t pursued that I can see.

Ultimately then what I think needs addressed in considering Peirce as a phenomenologist and most  importantly how it relates to science, is the question of the holistic nature of phenomenology.  I’d note Joe addresses this in paragraph 21.

This means, for example, that as you read the words on this page you are not “reading meanings into” the signs, as Peirce conceives it, but are rather perceiving the actualizations of the generating powers of the signs themselves. The power we have of “creating meanings” is not creational in that sense but only in the more modest sense in which we have the power of creating houses out of wood or pots out of clay: we take words–and, of course, other signs or representations–and put them together, i.e. arrange and rearrange them, just as we do other materials, and if we are good at this then of course we create unique artifacts, but there is no creation ex nihilo here. Given the frequent talk by phenomenologists about “constituting meanings” and the like, it seems important to stress here that one will find nothing like that in the Peircean philosophy. (This has important implications for the way in which intentionality is treated by Peirce, about which I will say only that it is not a topic of the first importance in his thought because he regards it as a conception to be explicated by more fundamental conceptions rather than as itself a fundamental explicating conception.)

Note though how close this corresponds to gestell.  It is an organization that allows things to reveal themselves.  It’s important that Joe contrasts this with phenomenologists of the Husserlian variety.  But note that this is exactly what Heidegger’s reformulation of Husserl does.

Related posts:

1. Peirce on Limiting the Pragmatic Maxim
2. Peirce on Reference
3. Peirce, Heidegger and Ready at Hand

There are however a few other important senses of vagueness that one finds especially in the contemporary literature.The most popular alternative take on vagueness deals with boundary conditions. Typically these are taken as places where there just isn’t a true statement as there is no agreement about what the property would be. The obvious example of this is when you take a man with a full head of hair and one hair at a time pluck them out. At what time does the man become bald? While most see this as an indeterminate boundary case some, such as Timothy Williamson, think there actually is a truth to when the person becomes bald but thinks it’s an inherently unknowable truth.

The Williamson position which is a vagueness of unknowable facts is often termed the Epistemicist position. I’d not it differs from Peirce primarily over the idea that such things are intrinsically unknowable. (Peirce tends to reject such a position) The other primarily position, that there just isn’t a true or false statement here, is called the supervaluationist position. Finally there are some who rather than rejecting it as having a truth condition sees it more as having an intermediate position. (Akin to say fuzzy logic where it is partially true) This view is termed the many-valued position. Finally some, the incoherentists, see it all as a problem of human languages and their intrinsic incoherence and inconsistency. That is the problem is less with epistemology or truth and just a fact about our languages.

While when I personally talk about vagueness I typically am using the Peircean position I recognize that many of the other positions sometimes fit. I’m pretty skeptical that there’s just one true notion of vagueness. Rather I think it just good to be aware of several senses. I’m not sure what to term that position. I guess I just see the phenomena as equivocal – although I’m
very sympathetic to the incoherentist position with regard to certain types of language use.

There is one last position I should bring up. I tend to see it as a subclass of the incoherentist position but often its broken out. Contextualists see vagueness as tied to a particular context. Switch the context and the truth condition changes. It’s just that when we apply language in a general way we miss that facet. I certainly agree this sometimes happens when we have indexicals in our sentences. I think too much is made of this since typically the controversial cases seem less open to contextual change. (i.e. I see this more as an artifact of certain examples) I also think this fits the Peircean case since one is simply ignorant of the proper context in which to determine a property.

Related posts:

1. Metaphysical Vagueness
2. 3 Kinds of Vaguess
3. Sider on Time and Vagueness

Vallicella references Putnam quite a bit. I enjoyed reading Putnam and he’s an excellent scholar of Peirce. But to me a lot of his career has been moving from really rejecting Peirce to rejecting Peirce less and less. (Maybe that’s not entirely fair, but I think it’s one way to read his views on both epistemology and realism)

For Peirce intentionality as a form of thirdness is in effect irreducible. It’s an inherent facet of the universe. Trying to reduce intentionality to causality is the attempting to reduce thirdness to secondness. It just can’t be done.

Peirce’s intentionality also has benefits over some early continental models. For instance Brentano’s (and, I’d argue Husserl’s — although I don’t want to get into that one right now). Peirce distinguishes between what he calls the immediate and dynamic objects. It appears he got this notion from the Scholastics although he gave it his own unique logical twist. For Peirce the dynamic object is the really efficient object that isn’t present. What is present to our mind is the immediate object which is the object as the sign represents it. That is he distinguishes between the object and its representation in a sign. Any sign only partially reveals its dynamic object. We get at best a guess.

An other way to look at Peirce’s conception of intentionality is that he distinguishes icons (signs of similarity) from indices (signs of existential connection). Yet once again icons can’t be reduced to an index nor vice versa. In most real signs both are present.

I won’t go through Peirce’s system. (If you’re unfamiliar with it I’d suggest the SEP on Peirce’s semiotics.

Peirce’s approach avoids a lot of problems that crop up in two place logics (such as Saussure’s semiotics). Effectively it entails what Peirce calls his Scholastic realism. That is that non-existing yet real entities can enter into real relations. This is Peirce’s conception that general terms are real. (What some might call universals) An other way of discussing this is that Peirce doesn’t think that signs can be reduced to tokens.

Related posts:

1. Intentionality and Potentiality
2. Peirce & OOP
3. Peirce on Reference

In the meantime over at The Splintered Mind today was an interesting post on inference to the best explanation. I want to go down a semi-tangent to that post. In the post Randolph Mayes notes that inference to the best explanation (IBE) originates with Peirce’s notion of abduction. I don’t think that’s really correct although quite a few scientific realists have equated IBE and abduction. Unfortunately so in my view.

IBE seems quite at odds with abduction and is much more caught up in Peirce’s notion of induction. For Peirce induction is the move from sample to population based upon the best inference. Abduction, on the other hand, is always for Peirce a kind of guess never governed by strict rules. That is it seems much more open and may be a neural net, bayesian inference or something else. To Peirce this is basically man’s ability to make educated correct guesses. He thinks this arises via evolution. We may attempt, of course, to formalize the kind of guesses one makes when one engages in abductive reasoning but I think Peirce means something much vaguer.

Now one of the popularizers of IBE is in fact the neo-Pragmatist Hilary Putnam. He introduced a form of IBE which has come to be known as the Boyd-Putnam formulation.

Scientists make realist assumptions. Partially on the basis of these realist assumptions they arrive at correct predictions. The truth of their assumptions is the best explanation for the success of these predictions. Hence scientific realism, or the truth of realism, is being inferred via an inference to the best explanation.

That is scientific realism is a correct metaphysical position simply because it’s the best explanation for why scientific predictions are so accurate.

Given Peirce’s actual sense of abduction rather than the form found among far too many scientific realists it seems to me Peirce’s realism defense would not be that it is the best explanation but rather it is our intuitive explanation and the one that withstands all further inquiry. That inquiry would consist of inductive and deductive testing of the hypothesis. I know many have argued that there is an inherent tension between Peirce’s pragmatism and his realism. But it seems to me his fundamental change of how one approaches epistemology deals with this quite well. For Peirce the transformation (except in ideal cases) is from rules of justification into doing ones duty with regards to inquiry and determining what we are unable to doubt. (I think one can best seen this sort of reasoning in his Neglected Argument for God; although it applies in a much stronger fashion to scientific realism in general)

Related posts:

1. Peirce on Maps
2. Metaphor and the Logic of Analogical Inference
3. Realism