Peirce Edition

Bio: Peirce Edition is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 5 citations.

Beyond the Instinct-Inference Dichotomy: A Unified Interpretation of Peirce's Theory of Abduction

Abstract: I examine and resolve an exegetical dichotomy between two main interpretations of Peirce’s theory of abduction, namely, the Generative Interpretation and the Pursuitworthiness Interpretation. According to the former, abduction is the instinctive process of generating explanatory hypotheses through a mental faculty called insight. According to the latter, abduction is a rule-governed procedure for determining the relative pursuitworthiness of available hypotheses and adopting the worthiest one for further investigation—such as empirical tests—based on economic considerations. It is shown that the Generative Interpretation is inconsistent with a fundamental fact of logic for Peirce—i.e., abduction is a kind of inference—and the Pursuitworthiness Interpretation is flawed and inconsistent with Peirce’s naturalistic explanation for the possibility of science and his view about the limitations of classical scientific method. Changing the exegetical locus classicus from the logical form of abduction to insight and economy of research, I argue for the Unified Interpretation according to which abduction includes both instinctive hypotheses-generation and rule-governed hypotheses-ranking. I show that the Unified Interpretation is immune to the objections raised successfully against the Generative and the Pursuitworthiness interpretations.

Is space flat? nineteenth-century astronomy and non-euclidean geometry

Abstract: The geometrical structure of space entered astronomy in the second half of the nineteenth century, but slowly and hesitantly. Although in this period non-Euclidean geometry became a very important branch of mathe- matics, it aroused little interest among the astronomers. Nonetheless, there were more contributors to 'non- Euclidean astronomy' than usually supposed, and their attempts to forge links between the new geometries and the astronomical sciences merit attention. While some astronomers, such as R.S. Ball and K. Schwarzschild, discussed the observational evidence for curved space, in one case the hypothesis was used to solve a cosmological problem, namely, Olbers' Paradox. This paper reviews developments from N.I. Lobachevsky in 1829 to P. Harzer in 1908.

Abduction − the context of discovery + underdetermination = inference to the best explanation

Abstract: The relationship between Peircean abduction and the modern notion of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a matter of dispute. Some philosophers, such as Harman (Philos Rev 74(1):88–95, 1965) and Lipton (Inference to the best explanation, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 58; 2004, p. 56), claim that abduction and IBE are virtually the same. Others, however, hold that they are quite different (Hintikka in Trans Charles S. Peirce Soc 34(3):503, 1998; Minnameier in Erkenntnis 60(1):75–105, 2004) and there is no link between them (Campos in Synthese 180(3):419–442, 2009). In this paper, I argue that neither of these views is correct. I show that abduction and IBE have important similarities as well as differences. Moreover, by bringing a historical perspective to the study of the relationship between abduction and IBE—a perspective that is lacking in the literature—I show that their differences can be well understood in terms of two historic developments in the history of philosophy of science: first, Reichenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification—and the consequent jettisoning of the context of discovery from philosophy of science—and second, underdetermination of theory by data.

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

Abstract: This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

Systems, Complex Systems, and Intelligence: an Educational Overview

Abstract: This contribution examines, for didactic purposes, the peculiarities of systems that have the ability to acquire, maintain and deactivate properties that cannot be deduced from those of their components. We evaluate complex systems that can acquire, lose, recover, vary the predominance of property sequences, characterized by their predominant coherence and variability, through the processes of self-organization and emergence, when coherence replaces organization. We consider correspondingly systemic epistemology as opposed to the classical analytic approach and to forms of reductionism. We outline aspects of the science of complexity such as coherence, incompleteness, quasiness and issues related to its modeling. We list and consider properties and types of complex systems. Then we are dealing with forms of correspondence that concern the original conception of intelligence of primitive artificial intelligence, which was substantially based on the high ability to manipulate symbols, and of those of a complex nature that consider emergent processes, such as inference, the learning, reasoning and memory. Finally, the recognition and acquisition of forms of intelligence in nature is explored, with particular reference to its emerging systemic processes.