tired fools

A while ago a friend gave me a copy of Malcolm Gloadwell’s “The Tipping Point”. It was, as he would say, good. It was a NYT bestseller, a look at how ideas spread within the culture. Later, some months ago, I was at another friends who’d just been interviewed by Gladwell. He had an advanced copy of “Blink”. Unwilling to wait for the publishing date, and failing to get the agreement of my friend to borrow it, I purloined the thing. Again it was good. I’ve recently come across many blog posts on Blink. Today one at Deep Green Crystals (entreprenuer / VC blog). The following is a comment I posted to his review:

I read Blink a while ago from an advanced copy I purloined from a friend. I liked it too, though I agree that the actionable content isn’t very high. Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of semiotics, associate of William James, disgraced philosopher, and all-round genius, is altogether different. Blink with more Think. He gives plenty more to go on. His work was lost for decades in the Harvard library and his contribution in many fields has only recently come to light.

He invented the term abduction, being a third form of inference (in addition to Induction and deduction). Induction is inferring the general from the specific; and deduction the specific from the general. Abduction, however, is the spontaneous generation of a hypothesis which is then to be tested by further observation. Like, Karl Popper, whose work may or may not derive from Peirce (the jury is still out), he claimed that this is the true methodology of science. It is abduction that is practised by Sherlock Holmes (there is a good book edited by Umberto Eco, “The sign of three”, that compares Holmes with Peirce). Peirce said “There is a more familiar name for it than abduction, for it is neither more nor less than guessing.”

Of further interest may be Timothy D Wilson’s “Strangers to Ourselves – Discovering the Adaptive Conscious” which rounds up current science on the subject.

Blink is abduction at work.

tags:gladwell, peirce