[MD] Intuitive Reasoning?

[ian glendinning]

Arlo quoted Einstein
"There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on
sympathetic understanding of experience."

Can i suggest my recent Love Life Before Logic post is sympathetic to this
Sympathy ... Love
Experience ... Life
Logic .... err ... Logic

Great clarification BTW, must add "abduction' to my David Deutsch
stuff about hypotheis generation ... he discussed at length, but i
don't recall him mentioning abduction.

Ian

On 9/21/06, ARLO J BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Case]:
> As for Sherlock Holmes, he was the master of logic and reason. He is fictional
> after all but while one might say he was blessed with intuition, he was not
> limited or guided by it. ...
>
> [Arlo]
> Charles Pierce, a fan of Holmes, attempted to formalize a third style of
> reasoning. He called this "abduction", and also at times "hypothetical
> inference", and later as "retroduction". He explains how it relates to
> deduction and induction with the following "beans in bag" example.
>
> Deduction
> Rule: All the beans in the bag were white
> Case: These beans were in the bag
> Result: These beans are white
>
> Induction
> Case: These beans were in this bag
> Result: These beans are white
> Rule: All the beans in the bag were white
>
> Abduction
> Rule: All the beans from this bag are white
> Result: These beans are white
> Case: These beans are from this bag
>
> Both Pierce and Pirsig, I'd note, were intrigued by "hypothesis generation".
> Pirsig wrote, "The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the
> categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person
> is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he
> understands something he didn't understand before." Pierce too wrote that
> "the abductive suggestion comes to us as a flash".
>
> Remember too that Pirsig had quoted Einstein as saying, "The supreme task—is
> to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built
> up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition,
> resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them --"
>
> There is a short article on abduction at:
> http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/abduction.html
>
>
>
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