[FRIAM] Foundationalism and the Peircean Cycle of Inquiry

[Nick Thompson]

Jon, 

 

Thanks for loaning me "Logicomix
<https://www.amazon.com/Logicomix-search-truth-Apostolos-Doxiadis/dp/1596914
521#reader_1596914521> " I am embarrassed to admit how useful I found it.
It made plain some things which have been hazy to me for years.  One such
lesson is how effing nuts "foundationalism" is.  I cannot believe that these
great minds got their knickers in a twist trying to achieve undoubtable
knowledge.  Now mind you, I, too, fell in love with Euclid, but I was 12 at
the time.  These people seem to have caught the disease when they were
adults and carried it to their graves.  

 

The most outrageous and still prevalent residue of foundationalism is the
notion that only deductive inference is "logical".  This assumption lies, I
am told by a philosopher colleague, at the root of the terrible confusion
demonstrated by the SEP article on abductio
<https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=Abduction> n. On this
account, both induction and abduction are illogical, no matter what
contribution they might make toward the identification of the truth.   Now
all acknowledge that inferences made via induction are fallible because runs
of positive events can always be generated even by random processes.
Similarly, all acknowledge that inferences made via abduction are fallible
because causes other than those we have inferred are always available to
explain the effects we have observed.  What is not generally acknowledged is
that every deduction relies on abduction to identify cases of  the minor
premise and deduction to relate those cases to the major premise.  Given
that any application of deduction to the world of experience requires both
induction and abduction to get it started, the claim that only deduction is
logical is absurd.  How could such a notion gain a footing amongst
intelligent people like Russell?    

 

I sort of see, because I see also that the alternative view of logic is
terrifying.  Take Peirce's notion that logic is how we SHOULD think, AND we
SHOULD think in ways that lead to the truth, AND the truth is defined as
that upon which the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run
AND the only clue we have to whether anything we believe NOW is true is
local and temporary convergences of opinion which we know to be utterly
fallible.  Given this understanding of "logical" how are we ever to decide
if any inference is logical.  Well, it's hard.  Some abductions we obviously
ought to make, and some we obviously shouldn't; some inductions we ought to
make, and some we shouldn't  and part of the science of statistics and
experimental method is deciding which sorts of inference are more valid than
others.  So validity becomes a kind of meta truth our view of which, like
every other kind of truth, is fallible.

 

I see that my rejection of a hundred years of analytical philosophy based on
my reading of a graphic novel is perhaps . um. precipitous, perhaps even,
ill-founded.  There is a review
<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3c41/b487a3ca9b85d35c7a69751f1bba1fa1a8e3.
pdf>  of the book which is by turns highly laudatory and profoundly
condemning.  After reading it, I was left feeling that I had invested a bit
too much faith in the book.  Still, to the extent that foundationalism is
the doctrine that all thought ought to be modeled after deductive logic, I
think my contempt for foundationalism is well founded.  

Nick 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

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