“Ignorance is light, knowledge is darkness”—Anonymous.
I have always, since early in the sixties, recognized three different types of reasoning, viz.: First, Deduction which depends on our confidence in our ability to analyze the meanings of the signs in or by which we think; second, Induction, which depends upon our confidence that a run of one kind of experience will not be changed or cease without some indication before it ceases; and third, Retroduction, or Hypothetic Inference, which depends on our hope, sooner or later, to guess at the conditions under which a given kind of phenomenon will present itself (Peirce to F. A. Woods, MS L 477, 1913).
Abstract
Are knowledge and belief pivotal in science, as contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science nearly universally take them to be? I defend the view that scientists are not primarily concerned with knowing and that the methods of arriving at scientific hypotheses, models and scenarios do not commit us having stable beliefs about them. Instead, what drives scientific discovery is ignorance that scientists can cleverly exploit. Not an absence or negation of knowledge, ignorance concerns fundamental uncertainty, and is brought out by retroductive (abductive) inferences, which are roughly characterised as reasoning from effects to causes. I argue that recent discoveries in sciences that coped with under-structured problem spaces testify the prevalence of retroductive logic in scientific discovery and its progress. This puts paid to the need of finding epistemic justification or confirmation to retroductive methodologies. A scientist, never frightened of unknown unknowns, strives to advance the forefront of uncertainty, not that of belief or knowledge. Far from rendering science irrational, I conclude that catering well for the right conditions in which to cultivate ignorance is a key to how fertile retroductive inferences (true guesses) arise.
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Notes
By standard textbook (or non-post-autistic) philosophy of science (STePS) I mean any account that begins introducing the topic with an outline of the problem of induction (say, the relevant chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy or What is this Thing Called Science, just to give two prominent exemplaries).
One might also allude, as one of the reviewers points out, to treatises such as Strauss (2006), which aim at uncovering the very conditions that make experience possible in our various states of affairs with reality. One might also add that the approach promoted in that book makes the still-prevailing distinctions one encounters in the social sciences, namely those between individualism or atomism on the one hand, and holism or universalism on the other, to look not only outmoded but antithetical to the purpose of a comprehensive account of scientific reasoning that would work across the human and the natural.
In an unpublished draft letter to Victoria Welby (July 16, 1905, MS L 463), Peirce calls retroduction “reasoning from surprise to inquiry”. He attributes a novel logical form, which is that of the Modus Tollens, to retroduction and in which the conclusion is put in the interrogative mood. The conclusion does not present a given hypothesis for contemplation; it merely suggests that it would be reasonable, given the overall goals and the context of investigation, to inquire whether a given hypothesis is true or not. The schema does not commit one to the truth of the hypothesis; it merely suggests the adoption of hypothesis to be reasonable in the sense of proposing specific strategic advantages to those who adopt it. That the logical form of retroductive reasoning has in Peirce’s work as its conclusion a request for information vindicates Hintikka (2007), who proposed that abductive inferences aim at answering the inquirer’s questions put to some definite source of information.
“Observations may be as fruitful as you will, but they cannot be said to be gravid with young truth in the sense in which reasoning may be, not because of the nature of the subject it considers, but because of the manner in which it is supported by the ratiocinative instinct” (EP 2: 472, An Essay toward Improving Our Reasoning in Security and in Uberty, 1913).
“I think logicians should have two principal aims: 1st, to bring out the amount and kind of security (approach to certainty) of each kind of reasoning, and 2nd, to bring out the possible and esperable uberty, or value in productiveness, of each kind” (Peirce to F. A. Woods, 1913; CP 8.384, 1913).
See Bakalis (2011) for a recent defence of the self-correcting thesis in relation to what came to be known as the chemical revolution.
This connectedness of the three stages of reasoning does not jeopardize the Autonomy Thesis, as it would be a misinterpretation of the Autonomy Thesis to state that the three stages of reasoning may not involve some elements of the other. What matters are the fine details in which deduction and induction enjoy their retroductive moments (Pietarinen & Bellucci 2014).
Dirac’s delta-function is, incidentally, often used in tackling inverse problems.
As well as Peirce, who echoes: “The investigator who does not stand aloof from all intent to make practical applications, will not only obstruct the advance of the pure science, but what is infinitely worse, he will endanger his own moral integrity and that of his readers” (EP 2: 29, 1898, Philosophy and the Conduct of Life). This remark communicates us how badly the true nature of pragmatism is still being understood; say, how the innocent reader of Menand’s 2002 book The Metaphysical Club may have come to understand it.
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Acknowledgments
Research supported by the project DiaMind (The Diagrammatic Mind: Logical and Communicative Aspects of Iconicity, funded by the Estonian Research Council PUT267, 2013–2015 and the Academy of Finland grant no.: 12786, 2013-2017, Principle Investigator A.-V. Pietarinen). A preliminary version of this paper was presented as a keynote in the conference Philosophy of Science in the 21st Century—Challenges and Tasks, December 2013, Lisbon; subsequent versions were presented in the International Conference on Epistemology and Cognitive Science at Xiamen University, and in the Philosophy Seminar of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, both in June 2014. The writing up of the paper was made possible by the Grant from the 2014 High-End Foreign Experts Program of State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, P. R. China. My thanks go to the organisers and audience of these meetings, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers of the present journal.
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Pietarinen, AV.J. The Science to Save Us from Philosophy of Science. Axiomathes 25, 149–166 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9261-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9261-8