Abstract
In order to fathom Peirce’s mind, and thereby in order to do science and philosophy in Peircean way, vision seems to be a perfect point of departure. For vision allows us to rethink what true interdisciplinarity would be like in our research. In this article, I shall show the central importance of visual abduction and abductive vision in our future study of abduction as well as Peirce’s thought. As exemplified well in Magnani’s study of abduction, we have good reasons to go with and beyond Peirce. After briefly scheming Peirce’s view on perception as abduction, I shall report what has been done in recent years in the fields of visual abduction and abductive vision. The centrality of visual abduction in Magnani’s theory of manipulative abduction will be one focal point. Another will be an examination of Raftopoulos’ discussion of abduction in late vision.
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Notes
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According to Campbell, the word “cotary” is a neologism from Latin, meaning “whetstone”. So, Peirce’s three cotary propositions of pragmatism are supposed to sharpen the concept of pragmatism (Campbell 2011, p. 54). I am indebted to Lorenzo Magnani for this reference. More detailed further hints are found in the editors’ footnote #1 for Peirce’s “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction” (EP, p. 530).
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Cadwallader cites “On a New List of Categories” (1867) [CP 1.545–1.559] and “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” (1868) [CP 5.213–5.263] in this regard (Cadwallader 1975, pp. 170–171).
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Based on Peirce’s own recollection and the evidence from the large set of notes that began around 1865 (Ms. 1956), Cadwallader notes that “[a]s the 60s progressed, Wundt’s influence began to be apparent in Peirce’s writings”. Also, based on a large notebook (Ms. 1156), Cadwallader reports that Peirce showed continued interest in Wundt by referring to Wundt’s Physiological Psychology of 1874 at least 47 times (Cadwallader 1975, p. 171).
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Here I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer, who convinced me that Raftotpoulos never denies the possibility of early abductive vision.
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Cf. Atocha Aliseda’s interesting comments: “On the other hand, some authors take induction as an instance of abduction. Abduction as inference to the best explanation is considered by Harman [Har65] as the basic form of non-deductive inference, which includes (enumerative) induction as a special case”.
This confusion returns in artificial intelligence. ‘Induction’ is used for the process of learning from examples—but also for creating a theory to explain the observed facts [Sha91]. Thus making abduction an instance of induction. Abduction is usually restricted to producing abductive explanations in the form of facts. When the explanations are rules, it is regarded as part of induction” (Aliseda 2006, p. 34).
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Park, W. (2017). From Visual Abduction to Abductive Vision. In: Abduction in Context. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48956-8_8
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