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p.1 For Peirce, the inductive method used in the sciences leads inevitably to truth; its justification lies in being self-corrective. It has the capacity to yield the correct result in the long run, whatever transitory errors and missteps may occur along the way. Peirce saw self-correction as the definitive characteristic of induction, which in its very nature "is a method of reaching conclusions which, if persisted in long enough, will assuredly correct any error concerning future experience into which it may temporarily lead us."
p.13-14 As Priestly put it:
Hypotheses, while they are considered merely as such, lead persons to try a variety of experiments, in order to ascertain them. These new facts serve to correct the hypothesis which gave occasion to them. The theory, thus corrected, serves to discover more new facts, which, as before, bring the theory still nearer to truth. In this progressive state, or method of approximation, things continue...
p.19 Peirce propounded an ingenious theory regarding the relationship between the results of scientific inquiry and the nature of "the real truth," in factual matters that deal with actual existence in the world... Peirce proposed that the truth is simply "the limit of inquiry," that is, what the scientific enterprise will discover in the idealized long run, or would discover if the efforts were so extended.
[JLJ - this brings up the bizarre concept that the the truth can change as our ability to inquire changes. We might arrive at a certain truth today, but 10,000 years from now we might change this "truth" because we as a species have an increased capacity to inquire. In my opinion, the truth is *always* a best guess, as arrived at by a culture pooling the resources of a scientific community, perhaps in the form of "news" as published by a Journal. The truth is... (pun intended) that there are only truth claims. ]
p.19 As Peirce put it, the truth simply is "the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate."
p.25 Peirce wrote in 1878: "the new phenomena which now remain to be discovered are probably only of secondary importance."
p.26 Peirce, in effect, saw the history of science as progressing through two stages: an initial or preliminary (noncumulative) phase of groping for the general structure of the qualitative relations among the parameters of nature, and a secondary (cumulative) phase of quantative refinement, where the second phase would determine with increasing precision the exact values of parameters that figured in equations whose general configuration was determined in the initial one.
p.29 As Thomas Kuhn and others have persuasively argued, today's most significant discoveries always represent an overthrow of yesterday's
p.34 Where there are inaccessible phenomena, there must be cognitive incompleteness... Where there are unobserved phenomena, we must reckon with the prospect that our theoretical systematizations are incomplete.
Thus, there is a limit, ultimately an economic limit, to the questions about the phenomena of nature that we can ever answer.
[JLJ - perhaps, but nations can pool their resources and create gravity wave telescopes and networked radio antennas and superconducting supercolliders.]
p.39 we do not need an a priori guarantee - not even a regulative assumption - that science will ultimately "deliver the goods" regarding the real truth of things. All that we do need is a reasonable assurance that by adopting the methods of scientific inquiry we shall do as well as it is possible to do in the epistemic circumstances of the case that the methodological posture of science is in no way inferior to its contemplatable alternatives.
p.42 [Peirce] Presumption is the only kind of reasoning which supplies new ideas, the only kind which is, in this sense, synthetic (CP, 2.776-777 [1902])
p.44 According to Peirce the guidance needed for effective theorizing issues from considerations of plausibility... As Peirce sees it, man is endowed through the evolutionary process not only with the instincts of an animal and with everyday "common sense" or "horse sense" but also with their functional equivalent in the cognitive domain, a sense of the plausible regarding the workings of nature:
Every inquiry whatsoever takes its rise in the observation... of some surprising phenomenon, some experience which either disappoints an expectation, or breaks in upon some habit of expectation.... At length a conjecture arises that furnishes a possible Explanation.... On account of the Explanation, the inquirer is led to regard his conjecture, or hypothesis, with favor. As I phrase it, he provisionally holds it to be "Plausible"; this acceptance ranges in different cases - and reasonably so - from a mere expression of it in the interrogative mood, as a question meriting attention and reply, up through all appraisals of Plausibility, to uncontrollable inclination to believe. (CP, 6.469 [1908])
p.44-45 He goes on to explicate the nature of plausibility:
By plausibility, I mean the degree to which a theory ought to recommend itself to our belief independently of any kind of evidence other than our instinct urging us to regard it favorably. All the other races of animals certainly have such instincts; why refuse them to mankind? ...Physicists certainly today continue largely to be influenced by such plausibilities in selecting which of several hypotheses they will first put to the test. (CP, 8.223 [c. 1910])
[JLJ - If not in physics, why not also in game theory? When playing a complex game of strategy we consider the plausible moves and a subset of the "long shot" moves, forming what is essentially a diagnostic test of the adaptive capacity to coerce our opponent, using the forces available to us.]
p.46 With Peirce, plausibility is... a tool of the "economy of research" that provides needed guidance for the efficient conduct of inquiry
[JLJ - human beings, day after day, confront a confusing and complex world-in-action and attempt to make sense of it, effortlessly, tirelessly, effectively "reading" the primarily social cues and clues available to us, in order to "go on" within it. We make presumptions constantly, as part of our day-to-day activities, that are usually correct - or at least "correctably" correct. We posture ourselves to shape the impressions formed when others make presumptions of us, thinking nothing of it beyond the ordinary, and absorbing it into the actual act of "going on" itself. It is only an extension of these learned activities - to a larger scale - that results in "science."]
p.53 The model of scientific inquiry presented by Popper rests on a combination of its three basic commitments:
- With respect to any given scientific issue the number of alternative hypotheses is always in principle infinite.
- Science proceeds by the trial and error elimination of hypotheses.
- This elimination process is inductively blind... At every stage, our search among the alternatives must be a matter of blind, random groping.
p.54 Popper... For him, the success of science is something fortuitous, accidental, literally miraculous (p.204) and totally unintelligible
[JLJ - science succeeds because humans are rabidly curious, and ego-driven to have their name associated with a concept, and have somehow convinced someone with money to fund them. That is all.]
p.55 If we are not entitled to regard hypothesis-elimination as narrowing the field of real possibilities, however, this entire eliminative process becomes probatively pointless.
p.56 the very best Popper can offer is the thought that our efforts to acquire information about the world by our investigative processes may possibly succeed: "That we cannot give a justification... for our guesses [i.e., scientific hypotheses and theories] does not mean we may not have guessed the truth, some of our hypotheses may well be true" (p. 30).
p.58 Peirce insists that trial and error cannot adequately account for the existing facts and that man's intellect must be credited with a truth-tropism.
p.59 [Peirce] man... cannot give any exact reason for his best guesses. It appears to me that the clearest statement we can make of the logical situation - the freest from all questionable admixture - is to say than man has a certain insight... An insight, I call it, because is to be referred to the same general class of operations to which perceptive judgments belong. This faculty is at the same time of the general nature of instinct, resembling the instincts of animals in its so far surpassing the general powers of our reason and for its directing us as if we were in possession of facts that are entirely beyond the reach of our senses. It resembles instinct too in its small liability for error... the relative frequency with which it is right is on the whole the most wonderful thing in our constitution. (CP, 5.172-173 [1903])
p.61 Hypotheses are not created ex nihilo by random groping; they are constructed on a suitable methodological foundation. They emerge not from random combinations but from the detection of patterns in the empirical data. Without such methodological guidance, we are driven to a "method" that is in effect the absence of a method... a merely random search through the possibilities.
p.62 Of course, we cannot eliminate the "implausible" candidates on the basis of certain knowledge, since the operative principles of analogy and coherence are only presumptive in their force. Such a cognitively constitutive stance is not appropriate. But we can take the cognitively regulative approach that certain sorts of alternatives ("plausible" on the basis of preserving analogies) can be taken as more worthy of serious considerations.
p.63 a possible and promising alternative to Peirce's handling of the key issue of abductive talent... this can now be construed not as a matter of a historically evolved instinct for creating truth-approximating hypotheses, but rather as a historically developed methodology for guiding the search for efficiently data-accommodating hypotheses... This shift from an instinctive and biological to a methodological and cultural hypothesis-selection process enables us to preserve all the advantages of Peirce's approach, while avoiding its problematic reliance on a somewhat mysterious instinct.
p.66 The first crucial step of the inductive process of hypothesis testing will thus be to decide which of the hypotheses that are in principle available merit immediate checking, which can be put off until tomorrow, and which can wait until Niagara runs dry.
p.66 [Peirce] [I]f two hypotheses present themselves, one of which can be satisfactorily tested in two or three days, while the testing of the other might occupy a month, the former should be tried first, even if its apparent likelihood is a good deal less... In an extreme case, where the likelihood is of an unmistakably objective character, and is strongly supported by good inductions, I would allow it to cause the [indefinite] postponement of the testing of a hypothesis... (CP, 5.598-600 [1903]: compare 6.528ff.)
p.66 the methodology of inductive practice is, in Peirce's view, pivotally dependent on the intelligent deployment of economic considerations from the very outset.
p.71 Peirce held that the inductive approach must ultimately yield truth even in the hands of the most bumbling of determined inquirers
p.72 [Peirce] knowledge that leads to other knowledge is more valuable in proportion to the trouble it saves in the way of expenditure to get that other knowledge.
p.72 To this idea of the economy of research - of cost-benefit analysis in inductive inquiry and reasoning - Peirce gave as central a place in his methodology of science as words can manage to assign. Yet no other part of this great man's philosophizing has fallen on stonier ground.
p.89 The conception of the economy of research in the actual conduct of inductive inquiry provides an instrument of considerable power.
p.90 For Peirce the "economy of research" encompasses the economics of inductive inquiry as a whole. It specifically includes:
- The economics of abduction, including the economics aspects of concept-development and hypothesis-projection. This would include, for example, such questions as "do we proceed with inquiry on the basis of the hypotheses we have in hand or should we continue further with the work of hypothesis-proliferation?"...
- The economics of retroduction (hypothesis-testing), including (a) the design of economical programs... and efficient testing-strategies and (b) the design of efficient tactics in evidence gathering including, for example, such questions as "Do we decide now between the hypotheses under consideration or do we continue with evidence-gathering?"
p.91 the crucial realm of the economics of abduction - how we should conduct our hypothesis-formulating efforts, and, in particular, just how much labor we should expend in the abductive stage of inquiry and how our resources may be expended most efficiently here - is a problem-area that is altogether untouched.
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