Keith.
That point about enthymemes is wonderful. Have you seen M.F. Burnyeat's 1996 piece called, "Enthymeme: Aristotle on the Rationality of Rhetoric?" That was the point that fundamentally affected my thinking on forms of valid argumentation. It's in a book edited by Rorty called Artistotle's Rhetoric. It's just wonderful. To space others, I'll refrain from a synopsis.
Just after Pierce we have William James, and all of this (including Andy's post) is getting me thinking about design as a form of pragmatism. Certain types of arguments; certain types of evidence; certain types of reasoning; and certain modalities of working are — or are not — generative, productive and "satisfactory" in a given (situated) act of design.
My quip about "design thinking" earlier might better be rephrased this way: The conversation we are having (circuitous though it may be) at least clusters around a genuine effort to find grounds for making claims about design as practice, and design theory. What see "design thinking" (ala IDEO and Stanford) doing is prosyletizing a reified approach to thinking and acting, and asking for "buy in." That is not building theory, and I'll stand my by earlier claim that all this is serious when it impacts others.
d.
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Derek B. Miller
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On Friday, April 1, 2011 at 1:55 AM, Keith Russell wrote:
> Dear Terry,
>
> yes, a guess, but also a taking away. That is, one can make another
> guess within a cycle of induction/deduction. Which will take us into the
> areas of grounded theory and most forms of literary analysis (read the
> book, think about it, make a guess, read the book again, take away the
> first guess, guess again based on the first guess and the second
> reading, read the book etc.)
>
> As Wiki tells us:
>
> The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced /*p*rs/ like
> "purse") (1839*1914) introduced abduction into modern logic. Over the
> years he called such inference hypothesis, abduction, presumption, and
> retroduction. He considered it a topic in logic as a normative field in
> philosophy, not in purely formal or mathematical logic, and eventually
> as a topic also in economics of research.
>
> The retroduction covers this sense of taking away the starting point
> and reinforces the AB part of ab-duction.
>
> I take Peirce's approach to be similar to that of Aristotle, in the
> Rhetoric. That is, Peirce is attempting to account for how we all go
> about the business of reasoning and he comes up with abduction;
> Aristotle is attempting to account for how we mostly go about arguing
> and he comes up with the the Enthymeme (a syllogism minus one of its
> arguments because the audience assumes the missing bit). Enthymeme
> means: to have in the mind.
>
> So I guess they were both being pragmatists?
>
> cheers
>
> keith
>
>
> Hi Fil, Andy and all,
> Peirce was perhaps the main original proponent and definer of
> abduction.
> His definition of 'abduction' was 'to guess' - nothing more complex.
> This suggests that the value of the concept of abduction is limited in
> design research unless one creates a whole lot more theory
> sophistication
> about the activity of 'making a guess'.
> In which case, using the term (and concept of) 'abduction' (with its
> limited meaning) isn't that helpful.
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
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