Abduction and Perception in Peirce’s Account of Knowledge

Abstract

Peirce’s methodeutical logic, or what might be called his “account of knowledge,” is focused on the nature of inquiry; and on that account, it is the nature of inquiry to develop toward a “final opinion” or “final consensus” over the long run. Peirce holds abductive processes to be key to this development in several ways. Not only does he characterize any process through which an hypothesis is introduced as abductive, Peirce also insists that perception is abductive. In the 1903 Harvard lectures, he argues that perception supplies the “first premises” for all our reasonings and inquiries – namely, our perceptual judgments, which include those judgments against which hypotheses are tested. To make sense of how perception can be abductive, but yield judgments rather than hypotheses, a non-essentialist reading of (Peircean) abduction is presented that extends, what Tomas Kapitan has called, Peirce’s “comprehension thesis.” Abductions can include processes resulting in judgments or in hypotheses, it can be inferential or non-inferential (e.g., an “insight”), and it can include nonpropositional associative processes involving only icons and indices (e.g., percepts). But while, in Peirce, “abduction” can cover so many different processes, it remains key to his account of inquiry and to his explanation for how inquiry would develop toward a final result.