| old_uid | 8104 |
|---|
| title | Is Abduction an epistemic feeling? |
|---|
| start_date | 2010/02/05 |
|---|
| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| summary | Abduction has received close attention and elaboration in many areas 1) in the philosophy of science, by people working on the process of hypothesis formation, or trying to unravel the conceptual problems that abduction as a reasoning faces, or attempting to assess the right model for an inference to the best explanation and to use abduction as a good argument for the case of scientific realism; but also 2) in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, on the part of researchers working on control, diagnosis analysis, ordinary reasoning and belief revision systems and looking into the computational modeling of abduction. Many difficulties still remain: in particular, can one view abduction both as an instinct, a guessing power capable of insight and creative discoveries (but, as such, partly uncontrollable) and as a genuine logical inference, submitted to constraints and norms, capable of both invention and selection but also autonomous, and irreducible to induction and deduction? Should we still distinguish the discovery and the justification parts of abduction, its psychological and cognitive aspects, on the one hand, its logical and epistemological aspects, on the other hand? Can abduction be ampliative (content increasing) enough and at the same time, confer epistemic warrant on its outcomes?
The first part of the talk will be devoted to what I take to be the essential cognitive and epistemic components of epistemic feelings (e.g.: in what way are they related to perception, doubt, reasoning, how can they be taken as perceptual entitlement, as question-answer processes within a context of inquiry, what is the part of rational and voluntary control and emotion and irrationality, what sense can we make of a dispositional ‘sentiment of rationality’, etc.). In the second part of the talk, I will try to explain in what way abduction can indeed be viewed essentially as an epistemic feeling, without losing anything of its psychological powers or logical and epistemological strength. In the final part of the talk, I will draw some implications of such a proposal and claim that it provides 1) a reply to many classical epistemological worries ; 2) a fruitful framework for analyzing the links (rather than oppositions) between the discovery and justification aspects of abduction, between the “logic of arguments” and “the rules of inference or reasoning”; 3) more generally, good arguments against the traditional divide still taken for granted by many, between psychology and the philosophy of mind on the one hand, logic and epistemology on the other hand.
Suggested Readings:
Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (1965). ‘The Idea of a Logic of Discovery’, Dialogue 4, 48-61. Harman, G. (1965). ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’, The Philosophical Review 74, 88-95; (1986) Change of View: Principles of Reasoning. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Hintikka, J. (1978) ‘Answers to questions’ in Questions, ed. H. Hiz, Dordrecht: Reidel; (1998). ‘What is Abduction? The Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epistemology’, Transactions of the CS Peirce Society 34, 503-33. Hookway, Ch. (2005) “Interrogatives and Uncontrollable Abductions”, Semiotica, 153: 101-115. Levi, I (1991). The Fixation of Belief and its Undoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipton, P. (1991). Inference to the Best Explanation, London: Routledge. Niiniluoto, I. 1999). ‘Defending Abduction’, Philosophy of Science 66, 436-51. Peirce, C.S. Reasoning and the Logic of Things, eds. K. Ketner and H. Putnam. Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP. Psillos, S. (1996). ‘On van Fraassen’s Critique of Abductive Reasoning’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 46, 31-47; (2002). ‘Simply the Best: A Case for Abduction’, in Computation and Logic, A.C. Kakas and F. Sadri (eds.), Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 605-25.Tiercelin, C. (2005) “Abduction and the Semiotics of Perception”, Semiotica 153: 389-412. Van Fraassen, B. (1989). Laws and Symmetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Walliser, B. Zwirn D. and Zwirn H. (2002). ‘Abductive Logic in a Belief Revision Framework’, Cahiers du Centre de Mathématiques et de Leurs Applications (CMLA), n°14, 1-32. Wisniewski, A. 1995. The Posing of Questions: Logical Foundations of Erotetic Inferences. Dordrecht: Kluwer; 1996. ‘The logic of questions as a theory of erotetic arguments’, Synthese, 109, 1-25. |
|---|
| responsibles | Pacherie, Dokic, Proust |
|---|
| |