[FRIAM] Agar, Abduction

[Michael Agar]

Nick--Here's a blurb on abduction, part of a lecture I did earlier  
this year on how to tell if something is a "real" ethnography. The  
full pack of lies available on request. The delete key might be a  
better choice.

Mike



Peirce’s abductive logic formalizes this critical part of any  
ethnographic trajectory. Let me borrow from an unpublished paper by  
Michael Hoffman, an artificial intelligence researcher at Bielefeld  
University. Here, in Peirce’s own words, as quoted by Hoffman, is  
abductive logic:

The surprising fact, F, is observed
If H were true, F would be a matter of course
Hence, there is reason to suspect that H is true



The “surprising fact F” echoes what I call “rich points.” Rich points  
are the raw material of ethnographic research. They run the gamut  
from incomprehensible surprise to departure from expectations to  
glitches in an aggregate data set. As Peirce would have advocated,  
the purpose of ethnography is to go forth into the world, find and  
experience rich points, and then take them seriously as a signal of a  
difference between what you know and what you need to learn to  
understand and explain what just happened. People are said to be  
creatures of habit and seekers of certainty. Abduction turns them  
into the opposite.

How do we make sense of all these big and little “F’s?” We don’t just  
box them in with old concepts in the style of inductive logic.  
Instead, we imagine “H’s” that might explain them. We imagine. The  
surprise F, the rich point, calls on us to create, to think, to make  
up an antecedent H that does indeed imply the consequent. Where did  
that F come from? Well, what if… H?  Rather than reaching into the  
box and pulling out a concept ready at hand, we make up some new ones.

Any trajectory in the ethnographic space will run on the fuel of  
abduction. You’ll read or see how surprises came up, how they were  
taken seriously, and how they were explained using concepts not  
anticipated when the story started.

We need to reign in our enthusiasm a bit. Peirce wants some  
plausibility. Stephen King just wrote a new thriller where, the  
review said, a pulse transmitted through cell phones turns users who  
happen to be calling at the time into monsters. The plot appeals to  
me, but the likelihood that the story will turn into an actual news  
item is pretty slim. It’s probably an entertaining read, but a  
plausible scenario?

Peirce also wants us to follow up the abductive epiphany with some  
tedious work. And the tedious work looks a lot like old-fashioned  
science. We need to systematically collect, compare and contrast, try  
to prove the new H à P link wrong, all that systematic drudgery,  
whether we’re in the lab or in the field. It reminds me of one of my  
favorite Einstein quotes, that he never made a significant scientific  
discovery using rational analytic thought. But he did a lot of work  
after the discovery to test it out. And it reminds me of Edison’s  
famous quote, since I mentioned his museum a while back--Genius is 1%  
inspiration and 99% perspiration. And it reminds me of why I like the  
first days of ethnographic work the best, because they are the most  
creative part where the learning curve accelerates exponentially.

Hoffman also emphasizes that the range of imagination in play is  
bounded by history. We can only stretch so far is the sad moral of  
the story. Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” about which I  
learned much from education colleagues during my visit, is a case in  
point. But still, some stretching is better than no stretching at  
all. That’s the message that abduction conveys.



On Aug 14, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Michael,
>
> I think I, too, am a fan of abduction, even though I am not so sure  
> I know what it is.  To me it means the use of metaphors to  
> explain.  A great many years ago, when I was still in the monkey  
> business, I was able to demonstrate that the "social structure" of  
> a monkey "group" was the same, whether one convened it as a whole  
> or only as a series of n(n-1)/2 pairs of monkeys, suggesting that a  
> monkey social group is an aggregate property of the behavior of its  
> pairs.  It was a startling observation, one I did not expect and  
> one I did not altogether trust.  What it suggested is that a group  
> of monkeys, maintained in individual cages, and paired for  
> observation, and who never had physical contact with monkeys  
> outside of those meetings, was a good metaphor (model) for the  
> group operating as a group in the ordinary sense.
>
> This is an example of a very low level abduction.  Natural  
> selection theory ... the idea that what happens in a breeders  
> barnyard or stable etc. can be taken as a model for what happens in  
> nature ... is an example of a very high level abduction.    
> Evolution ... the idea that the change in species through time is  
> akin to the ramification of a trees branches at it grows upward to  
> the light .... is another.  Good metaphors stimulate thought and  
> experiment, but a metaphor maker has a deep responsibility to  
> stipulate which parts of his metaphor are facetious ... designed  
> for fun and cognitive promotion, not part of what Mary Brenda Hesse  
> calls "the positive heuristic of the metaphor".  Famous authors of  
> widely read books often get away with ignoring that responsibility,  
> viz, Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene.
>
> So.  Are we talking about the same thing when we talk about  
> abduction?  As a man with a stiff hip, abduction is a concept I can  
> use some help with.
>
> Nick
>  age]

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