Strands of System
I'm currently reading Douglas R Anderson's -Strands of System: The Philosophy of C.S. Peirce- published by Purdue University Press (Go Boilers!:)
I'm interested in Peirce's sense of abductive or retroductive reasoning, particularly as Ulmer discusses it in relation to Conduction in Heuretics.
Here is the form of abduction:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect A is true.
... the model for fidning possible answers has as illustration the work of S. Holmes, who is able to use the clues (topoi) of a given situation to construct a plausible narrative such that he can test it out deductively and inductively (empirically). Ulmer uses this notion to move on to conduction where he thinking of clues from particular to particular, often through their aesthetic images.
But, where Peirce is useful is that it allows for a provisional testing of ideas.
I might add that CSP is a forefunner to Pragmatism.
I'm interested in Peirce's sense of abductive or retroductive reasoning, particularly as Ulmer discusses it in relation to Conduction in Heuretics.
Here is the form of abduction:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect A is true.
... the model for fidning possible answers has as illustration the work of S. Holmes, who is able to use the clues (topoi) of a given situation to construct a plausible narrative such that he can test it out deductively and inductively (empirically). Ulmer uses this notion to move on to conduction where he thinking of clues from particular to particular, often through their aesthetic images.
But, where Peirce is useful is that it allows for a provisional testing of ideas.
I might add that CSP is a forefunner to Pragmatism.
posted by gvcarter at 1:49 PM
2 Comments:
Guattari's transversality is a sense of the virtual.
Abduction-deduction-induction are perhaps too caught up in the ratios of probability, rather than virtual possibilisms (compossibility).
Ulmer's conduction is a sense of Deleuze's virtual.
Quick qualifier: Of course Guattari's sense of the virtual is a sandwich of actual-virtual.
In terms of linguistics, this actual-virtual sandwich is the double articulation of Louis Hjelmslev's content-expression.
Guattari (and Deleuze) both owe a great deal to Hjelmslev, and as G explains in -Molecular Revolution-, H's move is what they prefer to "arche-writing," which is what he sees at work in Derrida.
...
Now, the confluences of Peirce-Deleuze are perhaps more complicated than the probability (actual) and possibilisms (virtual) sandwich that I suggest.
For example, in Cinema I, Deleuze talks about Peirce's sense of "firstness," which is what D, in the lexicon of cinema concepts, calls an "affect image."
One could argue that Peirce's "firstness" is an expression of abduction, though folks like Eco who offer examples of abduction at work seem too tied to showing how Peirce's "guesswork" hooks up w/ more familiar probabilistic and verifiable logics such as deduction-induction.
For example, you walk into a room and you see a can of tuna in the corner and some tuna on the table. You say: that tuna came from that can.
In a sense, you've constructed a story that puts those two together as there is nothing necessarily ties that clump of tuna w/ that particular can.
Of course, one might go on from this story hypothesis and empirically test DNA remains of the tuna in the can w/ the remains on the table --should such a test be possible-- and further tighten your "virtual narrative."
... This is an example of stretching abduction-deduction-induction across probability, and this kind of logical progression makes sense.
....
But what of the sense as more of an expression or mood?
A mood rather than a logical mode?
Ulmer's conduction he says is caught up w/ Heid's sense of mood or 'stimmung.'
Stimmung ... an emotional sting ...
~~~~~~~~
During vv's resentation at Purdue, he played a series of movie clips w/ Walter Brennan.
In a series of clips from Howard Hawks's adaptation of Hemingway's -To Have and To Have Not- (which HH co-screenplayed w/ W. Faulkner), he shows Walter Brennan (a signature that v says he often confuses w/ Walter Benjamin ... though he doesn't develop that tangent further...)
In Brennan's scenes he asks the perplexing question, "Have you ever been bit by a dead bee?"
vv can, but cannot prepare us for this question when he says that at first the question seems like nonsense --"and it is nonsense"-- except IN REPETITION THE SENSE of this question fills the movie and gives for, vv, the sense of BEE-ing itself ...
~~~~~
Is Brennan's image an "affect-image"?
Note my shift from logical explication to storytelling :
Frosty the Snowman!
~~~~~~
Here's a poem by Wallace Stevens, who Simon Critchley takes up in his book -Very Little ... Almost Nothing- :
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter.
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted w/ snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged w/ ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is
~~~~~~~
Re-reading the opening chapter of -Parables for the Virtual- is a movement, affect, sensation, yes?
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