FW: Re: Agar, Abduction

[Nick Thompson]

----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Thompson
To: Michael Agar
Sent: 8/14/2006 11:27:01 PM
Subject: Re: Agar, Abduction


Mike,

The Peirce quote is absurd, as least so far as logic goes.  The fallacy is called affirming the consequent, is it not?  It is exactly this logical error that the GRE analytical reasoning exam tests for again and again, as if avoiding the affirmation of the consequent was the sole test of human intelligence.   The human predeliction for this fallacy was the basis for Cosmides and Toobey's invention of a cheater detection module since, on their account, cheater detection gives a more credible account of how people think than proper deductive inference.  

YOUR comments however seem more sound.  You raise an issue with which we struggled again and again in our Forum of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural psychology.  Just what are these data points, reachable through qualitative research, that have such transcendant value. The apple that falls up.  The Man that Bites the Dog.  The sexual freedom of the Trobriand Islanders and their sexual prudity a few generations later.  The ape that can talk with her hands and the Man Who Takes his Wife for a Hat.   I think Popper would claim that they are falsifying instances, events which if believed we cannot continue to believe some theory by which we normally explain order in the Universe.    But I think Hemple's deductive nomological model of explanation is a bad place to start.  I think what is undermined by these "falsifying" events is not premises in a logical chain but "Metaphors We Live By."   The only problem with your account is that, while gives us a way to explain the research that follows the surprize, it does not help us to understand why some facts are surprizing.  "Logic "says hempel and popper. " Metaphors" says Hesse and Laycoff and, Jochen Fromm ... and me.  

Nick .

Take care,

Nick



Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson


----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Agar
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net
Cc: Friam
Sent: 8/14/2006 7:12:20 PM
Subject: Re: Agar, Abduction


Nick--Here's a blurb on abduction, part of a lecture I did earlier this year on how to tell if something is a "real" ethnography. The full pack of lies available on request. The delete key might be a better choice.


Mike






Peirce?s abductive logic formalizes this critical part of any ethnographic trajectory. Let me borrow from an unpublished paper by Michael Hoffman, an artificial intelligence researcher at Bielefeld University. Here, in Peirce?s own words, as quoted by Hoffman, is abductive logic:
The surprising fact, F, is observed
If H were true, F would be a matter of course
Hence, there is reason to suspect that H is true
The ?surprising fact F? echoes what I call ?rich points.? Rich points are the raw material of ethnographic research. They run the gamut from incomprehensible surprise to departure from expectations to glitches in an aggregate data set. As Peirce would have advocated, the purpose of ethnography is to go forth into the world, find and experience rich points, and then take them seriously as a signal of a difference between what you know and what you need to learn to understand and explain what just happened. People are said to be creatures of habit and seekers of certainty. Abduction turns them into the opposite.
How do we make sense of all these big and little ?F?s?? We don?t just box them in with old concepts in the style of inductive logic. Instead, we imagine ?H?s? that might explain them. We imagine. The surprise F, the rich point, calls on us to create, to think, to make up an antecedent H that does indeed imply the consequent. Where did that F come from? Well, what if? H?  Rather than reaching into the box and pulling out a concept ready at hand, we make up some new ones.
Any trajectory in the ethnographic space will run on the fuel of abduction. You?ll read or see how surprises came up, how they were taken seriously, and how they were explained using concepts not anticipated when the story started.
We need to reign in our enthusiasm a bit. Peirce wants some plausibility. Stephen King just wrote a new thriller where, the review said, a pulse transmitted through cell phones turns users who happen to be calling at the time into monsters. The plot appeals to me, but the likelihood that the story will turn into an actual news item is pretty slim. It?s probably an entertaining read, but a plausible scenario?
Peirce also wants us to follow up the abductive epiphany with some tedious work. And the tedious work looks a lot like old-fashioned science. We need to systematically collect, compare and contrast, try to prove the new H ? P link wrong, all that systematic drudgery, whether we?re in the lab or in the field. It reminds me of one of my favorite Einstein quotes, that he never made a significant scientific discovery using rational analytic thought. But he did a lot of work after the discovery to test it out. And it reminds me of Edison?s famous quote, since I mentioned his museum a while back--Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And it reminds me of why I like the first days of ethnographic work the best, because they are the most creative part where the learning curve accelerates exponentially.
Hoffman also emphasizes that the range of imagination in play is bounded by history. We can only stretch so far is the sad moral of the story. Vygotsky?s ?zone of proximal development,? about which I learned much from education colleagues during my visit, is a case in point. But still, some stretching is better than no stretching at all. That?s the message that abduction conveys.


On Aug 14, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:


Michael,

I think I, too, am a fan of abduction, even though I am not so sure I know what it is.  To me it means the use of metaphors to explain.  A great many years ago, when I was still in the monkey business, I was able to demonstrate that the "social structure" of a monkey "group" was the same, whether one convened it as a whole or only as a series of n(n-1)/2 pairs of monkeys, suggesting that a monkey social group is an aggregate property of the behavior of its pairs.  It was a startling observation, one I did not expect and one I did not altogether trust.  What it suggested is that a group of monkeys, maintained in individual cages, and paired for observation, and who never had physical contact with monkeys outside of those meetings, was a good metaphor (model) for the group operating as a group in the ordinary sense.  

This is an example of a very low level abduction.  Natural selection theory ... the idea that what happens in a breeders barnyard or stable etc. can be taken as a model for what happens in nature ... is an example of a very high level abduction.   Evolution ... the idea that the change in species through time is akin to the ramification of a trees branches at it grows upward to the light .... is another.  Good metaphors stimulate thought and experiment, but a metaphor maker has a deep responsibility to stipulate which parts of his metaphor are facetious ... designed for fun and cognitive promotion, not part of what Mary Brenda Hesse calls "the positive heuristic of the metaphor".  Famous authors of widely read books often get away with ignoring that responsibility, viz, Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene.  

So.  Are we talking about the same thing when we talk about abduction?  As a man with a stiff hip, abduction is a concept I can use some help with.  

Nick
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