Foundationalism and the Peircean Cycle of Inquiry

[Nick Thompson]

Jon,

 

Thanks for loaning me “Logicomix” I am embarrassed to admit how useful I found it.  It made plain some things which have been hazy to me for years.  One such lesson is how effing nuts “foundationalism” is.  I cannot believe that these great minds got their knickers in a twist trying to achieve undoubtable knowledge.  Now mind you, I, too, fell in love with Euclid, but I was 12 at the time.  These people seem to have caught the disease when they were adults and carried it to their graves. 

 

The most outrageous and still prevalent residue of foundationalism is the notion that only deductive inference is “logical”.  This assumption lies, I am told by a philosopher colleague, at the root of the terrible confusion demonstrated by the SEP article on abduction. On this account, both induction and abduction are illogical, no matter what contribution they might make toward the identification of the truth.   Now all acknowledge that inferences made via induction are fallible because runs of positive events can always be generated even by random processes.  Similarly, all acknowledge that inferences made via abduction are fallible because causes other than those we have inferred are always available to explain the effects we have observed.  What is not generally acknowledged is that every deduction relies on abduction to identify cases of  the minor premise and deduction to relate those cases to the major premise.  Given that any application of deduction to the world of experience requires both induction and abduction to get it started, the claim that only deduction is logical is absurd.  How could such a notion gain a footing amongst intelligent people like Russell?   

 

I sort of see, because I see also that the alternative view of logic is terrifying.  Take Peirce’s notion that logic is how we SHOULD think, AND we SHOULD think in ways that lead to the truth, AND the truth is defined as that upon which the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run AND the only clue we have to whether anything we believe NOW is true is local and temporary convergences of opinion which we know to be utterly fallible.  Given this understanding of “logical” how are we ever to decide if any inference is logical.  Well, it’s hard.  Some abductions we obviously ought to make, and some we obviously shouldn’t; some inductions we ought to make, and some we shouldn’t  and part of the science of statistics and experimental method is deciding which sorts of inference are more valid than others.  So validity becomes a kind of meta truth our view of which, like every other kind of truth, is fallible.

 

I see that my rejection of a hundred years of analytical philosophy based on my reading of a graphic novel is perhaps … um… precipitous, perhaps even, ill-founded.  There is a review of the book which is by turns highly laudatory and profoundly condemning.  After reading it, I was left feeling that I had invested a bit too much faith in the book.  Still, to the extent that foundationalism is the doctrine that all thought ought to be modeled after deductive logic, I think my contempt for foundationalism is well founded. 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

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