KIM Sung-do (Korea University, Department of Linguistics)
 

0. Preliminary remarks

Abductive reasoning is the process of adopting an explanatory hypothesis, which is the first phase of any scientific inquiry and interpretive strategy. Since, for Peirce, "mind is a sign developing according to the laws of inference" (CP 5.313), semiosis, the infinite process of interpretation of signs, is constructed as an argumentation. With this concept of abductive reasoning as "logic of discovery", Peirce attempted to renovate the Kantian question of how synthetic reasoning is possible at all.

In this way the notion of abductive inference becomes a crucial issue for the evolution of knowledge and interpretation. In his "Lectures on Pragmatism," Peirce states that the question of pragmatism "is nothing else than the question of the logic of abduction." That is, "pragmatism proposes a certain maxim which, if sound, must render needless any further rule to as to the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses, that is to say, as explanations of phenomena held as hopeful suggestions" (CP 5.196). Since it is "the only kind which is, in this sense, synthetic," it must be by abductive reasoning that we have the capacity" to learn anything or to understand phenomena at all. Even perceptual judgments are to be regarded as "extreme cases" of abductive inferences. In other hand, as an "act of insight" that "comes to us like a flash," abduction is also connected with creative and aesthetic experiences such as contemplation, daydreaming, and play of thought, which Peirce calls "musement". Also, such a abductive guessing takes into account both the nature and the culture. In fact, some Peircian scholars (Massimo Bonfantini and Giampaolo Proni 1983) suggested interpreting the abductive guessing instinct not only as a "natural insight" but also as an insight in our cultural background. In consequence, as Umberto Eco points out (Eco 1984), the abductive "logic of interpretation" could also become a model for hermeneutic processes. In sum the abduction is associated with not only a logic or an epistemology but it imposes a new ontology and anthropology. But our topic here focuses on the aesthetic instance of abduction. Because the production of meaning cannot be reduced to purely cognitive dimension but comes from the totality of senses, the abduction is a core of aesthetic experience. Also we would like to show some epistemological affinities between the abduction and the semiotics of last Greimas. (Greimas 1987, 1991).

1. The place of aesthetics in the Peircean pragmatism

Before treating this subject matter, we need some remarks on the aesthetic foundations of his pragmatism. First of all it is required to bear in mind that the most important basis of abduction relies on aesthetic foundation. Though theres is no systematic elaboration of aesthetic sign, with Calabresse (Calabresse 1994), we should say that Peirce's remarks on aesthetics is a theory of aesthetic experience. This theory is a part of the theory of experience which belongs to the theory of knowledge in general. In this sense, Peircean aesthetics is a kind of cognitive aesthetics contrasted with a passional aesthetics. Secondly, in terms of the classification of sciences, he conceived of 'esthetics' as a normal science and connected it with ethics and logic in the same category of normative sciences which governs the human values. According to his definition, the aesthetics is the science of determining what kind of relationship is created when a subject and an object are bound in an actual experience concerning beauty. In his most elaborated formulation he defined it as "the theory of the deliberate formation of such habits of feeling" as can be developed through a series of "self-criticisms and hetero-criticisms" (CP 1.574).

2. The Aesthetic Experience as a Form of Reasoning

Before the discovery of abduction the early fragments of young Peirce developed an interesting scheme of the aesthetic experience as a particular form of reasoning. At the one hand we find the attitude of arguing laws from cases, and on the other of creating cases from laws. induction and deduction. Aesthetics is certainly a third one. In other words, the aesthetics which traces out the beauty is the sum of both, a search for laws and a search for cases. We design the beauty by interaction with the object, or by considering it a case from which we go toward a law, or thinking of laws and imagining cases which depend upon laws. The aesthetic experience is a formalization which starts from individual perceptions and an individual occurrence starting from general laws.

In sum, the definition of aesthetic experience is very near to the abduction. As we know, the sense of beauty is a very complex feeling, because it emerges as a hypothesis concerning an enormous set of impressions coming from the object. So, it is clear that Peirce connects the aesthetic experience to reasoning because he considers it as organized according to the laws of hypothesis. In a Peircean model explaining the process which participates in the production of interpretant from the impression to hypothesis via the attention, feelings are clearly reactions of a subject in front of an object under the shape of certain impressions. What produces the hypothesis from the impression is one of our inner capacities, attention. By means of attention we translate our hypothesis into an interpretant.

Now we come to some conclusions. Peircean ideas on the aesthetic experience is brought into a general scheme in relation to reasoning. Peirce regards an aesthetic experience as a particular and lower form of reasoning. Our experience of the world begins with impressions, which are the first degree of perception, and which produce some unconscious and immediate effect. This impression is transformed into sensations or feelings via attention. Among these sensations there is a sense of beauty. The crucial point of the Peircean originality consist in describing the different levels of knowledge in the shape of human knowledge in the dimension of inference. We quote Peirce: "An emotion is always a simple predicate substituted by an operation of the mind for a highly complicated predicate [...] in other words it fulfills the function of a hypothesis." Another interesting point should be noted. Peirce perceives that the aesthetic experience is a process and must be recognized as a relationship between a subject and an object that we can conceive as a narration.

"Every emotion has a subject [...]. In short, whenever a man feels, he is thinking of something. Even those passions which have no definite object - as melancholy - only come to consciousness through tinging the objects of thought. That which makes us look upon the emotions more as affections of self than other cognitions, is that we have found them more dependent upon our accidental situations at the moment than other cognitions [...] Fear arises when we cannot predict our fate; joy, in the case of certain indescribable and peculiarly complex sensations. If there are some indications that something greatly for my interest, and which I have anticipated would happen, may not happen; and if, after weighing probabilities, and investing safeguards, and straining for further information, I find myself unable to come to any fixed conclusion in reference to the future, in the place of that intellectual, hypothetical inference which I seek, the feeling of anxiety arises. When something happens for which I cannot account, I wonder. When I endeavor to realize myself what I never can do, I hope." (requoted accorting to Calabress 1994, 151)

The examples concern the emotions which are described not only in terms of a transformation of the subject's state, but even in terms of modalities : to want, to have to, to be able to, to know. This concept of emotional experience shows some similarities with the narrative semiotics of Greimas, or his semiotics of passions. The reason is quite simple. The two semiotic paradigms share the phenomenological foundation. For example, some excellent studies of Coquet (Coquet 1991, 1992) showed this epistemological convergence or connivance of the structural semiotics and phenomenology.

3. The aesthetic phenomenology: the tactility & the abduction

We call this phenomenological foundation the aesthetic phenomenology. We refer to the work of Serres, The Five senses which could be related to aesthetic phenomenology. This phenomenology is quite different from the approach of Merleau-Ponty who works on finding a philosophic and reductive metalanguage. On the contrary Serres works in constant scepticism towards any reduction. "To analyse means to destroy (...) The theory of knowledge does not tolerate composition. But the confusion composes a liquid multiplication in which multiplicities play not-discretely, changing in continual varieties (...) It is as if the analysis hadn't yet accepted these complex and varied functions which it itself has threatened for two centuries. We return again to the mixture and to the concept of variety, immediate in the rich, complex, lively experience of the senses..." (Serres, 1986: 181-182).

To go back to the mixed, the multiplicity, the complexity, the composition, is practiced in an aesthetic phenomenology which takes off from what Serres calls a Philosophie des corps m l s. A philosophy which appreciates the skin. And Serres puts forth the question of the mixed body, which results in a phenomenology which has as its aim to think a fluid, chaotic world and a sensing body in this flow. This takes place mainly in a single parameter, namely tactility. As the abduction is a model of cognition in Peirce, in Serres the tactility becomes a model of cognition. And this so-called generalized tactility is thought of as double; it is both a sensing and a sensed skin. Tactility is the manner in which a generalized objectivity is possible. The touched and the touching skin: "is a variety of contingence: in it, by it, with it, it touches the world and my body, the sensing and the sensed are touching each other, it defines their common edge. Contingence means common tangency: world and body intersect in it, in it they care (...) The skin itself several things of the world and makes them mingle." (1986: 82). And the world is then a massiveness of impressions that imprints the touching and the touched skin. The skin is correctly human, but it is also a surface, a tissue, a textile; it is a simulacrum in which Serres discovers the philosophical point that the world, body and the connections between the subjective and the objective are to be comprehended as surfaces - topologies ; the skin occupies no depth, generalized tactility is found on the surface: In generalizing this hypothesis one can say that the tissue, the textile, the stuff provides excellent models of cognition, excellent quasi-abstract objects, initial varieties. (cf. ibid).

Topology is tactile in virtue of physicality. That this is an aesthetic phenomenology which has generalized tactility as the goal of objectivity, with the skin as an "inter-world". Like Peirce, through the aesthetic and the beautiful, Serres discovers the manner and the model by means of which cognition becomes possible. The skin becomes a place of sensation, a map of cognition and phenomenology - and so saying a topological map. This topological map of sensation contains the touching and the touched skin. Which produces the meaning and interprets the signification is not purely cognitive activity, rather, the networks of sensations, the body. The abduction is one of synesthetic sensations and it also shows some similarities with the concept of the touching of Greimas. We quote: "Le toucher, la plus profonde des sensations partir desquelles se développent les passions du corps et de l' me, vise, en fin de compte, la conjonction du sujet et de l'objet, seule voie menant l'esthésis. [...] Le toucher est plus que l'esthétique classique veut bien lui reconna tre... il se situe parmi les ordres sensoriels les plus profonds, il exprime prox miquement l'intimit optimale et manifeste, sur le plan cognitif le vouloir de conjonction totale" (Greimas 1987: 92, 30.)

4. The three levels of abduction: the bio-abduction, the socio-abduction, the erotic abduction

The meaning formation is embodied as an experience of wholeness. So, why are isolated details experienced as a global connectedness, why does a real world, an art work, appear as a continuity? This question can also be brought into focus in the theory of the abduction. How is meaning organized, and more important - how are different semantic universes organized in different contents with different references to different aspects of the abduction? Part of the answer to how discontinuity can be perceived continuously is based on the fact that impression information is capable of being dynamic relations that leap between layers. In other words, the continuity lies in the dynamic potential, in the sequential possibility. The abduction is a semantic continuum in human perception. With the abduction there is question of meaning - in a certain sense the abduction is a hermeneutic instance: the abduction interprets phenomena from the outer and the inner world, and yet these meanings are stratified in relation to the internal deterministic infrastructure - so that any arbitrary hermeneutics cannot be admitted.

In any case, the theory of abduction resembles the cognitive material in so far as we are speaking of three strata - the bio-abduction, the socio-abduction, the erotic-abduction, in that these refer directly to the cognitive worlds. Firstly, the bio-abduction or the biological abduction is an individual stratum oriented according to elementary significant and relevant categories. Desire and instinct are the most representative ones. Here we should evoke the biological basis of inquiry that Peirce pointed out clearly: "On the Algebra of Logic", "Thinking, as cerebration, is no doubt, subject to the general laws of nervous action." (3.155). In the wider sense which occurs in the context of his transcendentalism, he treats habit a synonym for natural law.

One might say that this stratum of the needs and the instincts will moreover appear compelling in relation to the object's experiences. Isolated experiences of pleasure and pain, the near and the distant, the large and the small, the hard and the soft regulate this stratum's thymes. Now the world will appear near and euphoric, now distant and dysphoric. And contained in this bio-abduction stratum is a distribution of the simple morphologies, the euphoric and the dysphoric, so that the latter become a sustaining medium for experiencing the world as form carried by the form related morphologies. The euphoric will be attached to near sensing. The near, the dense - taste, smell, and touch - will be connected with the experience of the body in continuity with the world. Here we must mention an important fact. The bio-abduction will give priority to the near senses tactile contact with the real world. The bio-abduction will be a stratum which on the whole is regulated by the private "having" or "lacking". Conversely, we see in this stratum that the distant and diffuse are established on dysphoric morphologies. Dynamically the following topology can be a depiction of these phenomena. (cf. Hans-Eric Larsen 1997)
Distant/Near
Dysphoria/Euphoria

Here we cannot pass the theory of Greimas on thyme. In the framework of his narrative semiotics he presented a semiotic-phenomenological definition: "La catégorie thymique sert articuler le s mantisme directement li la perception qu'a l'homme de son propre corps. [...] La catégorie thymique s'articule, son tour, en euphorie/dysphorie et joue un rôle fondamental dans la transformation des micro-univers sémantiques en axiologies: en connotant comme euphorique une deixis du carr s miotique, et comme dysphorique la deixis opposée, elle provoque la valorization positive et/ou n gative de chacun des termes de la structure élémentaire de la signification. " (Greimas et Court s 1979: 396-397.)

In this text, we can find 3 important intuitions. First, the thymical valorize the sense, because the thyme transforms the semantic universe into axiologies. Secondly, the thyme is considered as a interproceptivity. Third, the thymical category concerns the play of attraction/repulsion, objective and intersubjective.What is the nature of this thyme? Unconsciousness and impulse. Le contenu "inconscient" et "pulsionnel" est dit une "pure pregnance thymique, rendue dans un second temps significative". Greimas make a conclusion: "c'est le sens qui symbolise le thymique et non pas le thymique qui connote le sens". This definion indicates a tendence to the eroticization of pleasure. In the important article "Of the modalization of being", he introduces the conceptual components of the category thymical: "Une catégorie sémantique peut être axiologisée par la projection...de la catègorie thymique dont les contraires sont nomm s euphorie/dysphorie. Il s'agit d'une catègorie "primitive", dite aussi prioceptive, l'aide de laquelle on cherche formuler, très sommairement, la manière dont tout être vivant, inscrit dans un milieu, "se sent" lui-même et réagit son environnement, un tre vivant tant considéré comme "un système d'attractions et de répulsions" (Greimas 1986).

We should mention 4 elements in this definition.
- valorization (thyme, pleasure as qualitative value),
- interoceptivity (link with body as a center of coordination of the sensorial life)
- the double mouvance (concentration/ex-centration, attraction/repulsion)
-  vitalism (the mediating life between the passives and virtual sensations and the universe semiotised.

Unfortunately, Greimas did not succeed in thematizing the swing of the pleasure/thymy between eros and aesthesis, between the erotic and the esthetic. But in his late book De l'imperfection Greimas envisaged the esthetization of the thymic category. In the [S miotique des passions] the swing of the thymical category between the erotic and the esthetic is tried and falls again in a erotic tendency. For the Greimas, the erotic is a level of precondition of meaning. "Le sentir se donne d'emblée comme une manière d' être qui va de soi, ant rieurement toute empreinte ou grâce l' limination de toute rationalit; selon certains, il s'identifie" (Greimas 1991).

The second category is called socio-abduction. There is in this socio-abduction question of a common knowable and communicable "world" and reference semantics. It is in this stratum that we find the social and common understandable world. The socio-abduction is an inter-subjective world. And it is in this socio-abductive stratum one refers to impersonal and formal frameworks for understanding the world as such. One understands the inter-subjectivity through frameworks and norms. Viewed thymically, this socio-imaginary stratum is interesting in that there occurs an inversion of values. it is the socio-abductive stratum that the rules of good distance become norms.

The third strata is covered by erotic-abduction. This category of abduction belongs to a world of desire, ideas of the other person, dreams and reveries. Remember that the dream is one of examples of abduction proposed by Peirce. We are speaking of an individual stratum, where we again find an inversion of distant and near senses so that near-sensing's tactile element - the water - again becomes a euphoric valorizing area. The nocturnal tenderness, erotic-physical love, the tactility of caresses whatever, appear to live their lives in this stratum. The projections and symbolizings can be imagined as being material which comes from this erotic-abduction. In this context, the thought and the analysis are two erotic figures, because they try to find the hidden secret of the other. Because both thinking and the erotic-affective exploit a basic notion of the other as something that is hidden, a reality that must be brought to light. The erotic-phantasmic altogether exploits a continuous "being" behind the salient and possibly discontinuous.

Given that the process of abduction is present in every moment of psychic life, including that of sensation, the inherent opening to alterity is the foundation of all totalizing operations. The openness to alterity is relative to the different levels of liberty and creativity in abductive organization. Together with Peirce, we might call the relation that is established between the sign and the interpretant in such abductions, an agapestic relation. The premiss is connected to the conclusion by a movement of affinity or attraction stronger and more passionate than any calculation of convenience, exchange, correspondency and equivalence. Platonically, we could say that, in this case, knowledge is animated by Eros which sets aside all produce and convenience, thus risking exposure even when uncertain of finding support. the relation between sign and interpretant is neither a question of chance nor of mechanical necessity (cf. Ponzio 1985). We are dealing rather, with a movement of evolutionary development through creative and agapestic love. These three strata function dynamically in constant interaction. We should construct a theory of trans-abduction. The theory of the trans-abduction's structures must be understood within a continuum. The bio-abduction merges into socio-abduction and subsequently into erotic-abduction. Secondly the dynamics is readable in the three stratas' internal distributions of thymic morphologies and elements. These dynamics are relations which must be imagined in relation to each other, in that the relational movement itself is the argument for our experiencing the world in one and only one plane at a time.

5. Conclusion

Now we get some crucial conclusions. First, abductive connection between the presmiss and the conclusion is accomplished by a movement of affinity or attraction stronger than any formal calculation of convenience, and equivalence. Secondly, abduction should be investigated not merely on the semiotic level, but on the semantic level. In this regard it can be associated with the 'referential principle' of P. Ricoeur. Thirdly, abduction must face the ontological, epistemological and esthetic conditions which surpass the conventional framework of Peircean semiotics, temporality, judgement signification, etc, In consequence, the aesthetic phenomenology of abduction must be considered under the rubric of phenomenology of discursivity.

6. Bibliography

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