Publicação: Instinct and Abduction in the Peircean Informational Perspective: Contributions to Biosemiotics
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Proposals for hypotheses inundate us in an overwhelming flood, while the process of verification to which each one must be subjected before it can count as at all an item, even of likely knowledge, is so very costly in time, energy, and money-and consequently in ideas which might have been had for that time, energy, and money, that Economy would override every other consideration even if there were any other serious considerations. In fact there are no others. For abduction commits us to nothing. It merely causes a hypothesis to be set down upon our docket of cases to be tried. I shall be asked, Do you really mean to say that we ought not to adopt any opinion whatever as an opinion until it has sustained the ordeal of furnishing a prediction that has been verified? In order to answer that question, it will be requisite to inquire how an abduction can be justified, here understanding by abduction any mode or degree of acceptance of a proposition as a truth, because a fact or facts have been ascertained whose occurrence would necessarily or probably result in case that proposition were true. The abduction so defined amounts, you will remark, to observing a fact and then professing to say what idea it was that gave rise to that fact. One would think a man must be privy to the counsels of the Most High so to presume. The only justification possible, other than some such positive fact which would put quite another color upon the matter, is the justification of desperation. That is to say, that if he is not to say such things, he will be quite unable to know anything of positive fact. In a general way, this justification certainly holds. If man had not had the gift, which every other animal has, of a mind adapted to his requirements, he not only could not have acquired any knowledge, but he could not have maintained his existence for a single generation. But he is provided with certain instincts, that is, with certain natural beliefs that are true. They relate in part to forces, in part to the action of minds. The manner in which he comes to have this knowledge seems to me tolerably clear. Certain uniformities, that is to say certain general ideas of action, prevail throughout the universe, and the reasoning mind is [it] self a product of this universe. These same laws are thus, by logical necessity, incorporated in his own being. For example, what we call straight lines are nothing but one out of an innumerable multitude of families of nonsingular lines such that through any two points there is one and one only. The particular family of lines called straight has no geometrical properties that distinguish it from any other of the innumerable families of lines of which there is one and one only through any two points. It is a law of dynamics that every dynamical relation between two points, no third point being concerned, except by combinations of such pairs, is altogether similar, except in quantity, to every such dynamical relation between any other two points on the same ray, or straight line. It is a consequence of this that a ray or straight line is the shortest distance between two points; whence, light appears to move along such lines; and that being the case, we recognize them by the eye, and call them straight. Thus, the faculty of sight naturally causes us to assign great prominence to such lines; and thus when we come to form a hypothesis about the motion of a particle left uninfluenced by any other, it becomes natural for us to suppose that it moves in a straight line. The reason this turns out true is, therefore, that this first law of motion is a corollary from a more general law which, governing all dynamics, governs light, and causes the idea of straightness to be a predominant one in our minds. In this way, general considerations concerning the universe, strictly philosophical considerations, all but demonstrate that if the universe conforms, with any approach to accuracy, to certain highly pervasive laws, and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright. This conclusion is confirmed when we find that every species of animal is endowed with a similar genius. For they not only one and all have some correct notions of force, that is to say, some correct notions, though excessively narrow, of phenomena which we, with our broader conceptions, should call phenomena of force, and some similarly correct notions about the minds of their own kind and of other kinds, which are the two suficiente cotyledons of all our science, but they all have, furthermore, wonderful endowments of genius in other directions. Look at the little birds, of which all species are so nearly identical in their physique, and yet what various forms of genius do they not display in modelling their nests? This would be impossible unless the ideas that are naturally predominant in their minds were true. It would be too contrary to analogy to suppose that similar gifts were wanting to man. Nor does the proof stop here. The history of science, especially the early history of modern science, on which I had the honor of giving some lectures in this hall some years ago, completes the proof by showing how few were the guesses that men of surpassing genius had to make before they rightly guessed the laws of nature.... (CP 5.602-604)
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Peirce and Biosemiotics: a Guess at the Riddle of Life. Dordrecht: Springer, v. 11, p. 151-169, 2014.
