The Abduction of Abduction - On CS Peirce and others.pdf
Hussein Ali Agrama
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Abstract
I want to thank our panelists for their thought-provoking papers on Peirce's notion of abduction, and I also want to thank them for inviting me to join as a discussant, so that we can think together along the various lines they have laid out. The reflections I wish to offer here, though inspired by all of the papers, are not specific to any one of them. What I have to say will nevertheless touch upon each one of them, although in a somewhat oblique way. But what I have become interested in, and would like to think about more, are some of the things abduction as a style of reasoning presupposes, especially in relation to the understanding of truth it entails, the notions of experience and time on which it depends, and the various virtues it valorizes – including the openness to surprise, the skill of being led by distraction, and the capacity for inventiveness. What I am especially interested in is the allure of abduction, not just in how we might get abducted by abduction, but also in how abduction might abduct itself and the conditions of its own efficacy, and particularly in the face of recent experience. Now at this point, even if it seems like a digression, I think there is something that needs to be said in light of recent events, which have come as a shock to nearly every person with a claim to social theoretical expertise. In the midst of the current confusion, we should seriously ask ourselves if we can trust our capacities to adjudicate between, or even come up with, social-political theoretical explanations at all. I speak not only of these elections. We might place their outcome within a continuum of recent events that have stunned and stymied all of us – including Brexit, the rise of Occupy and Tea-Party like movements across the globe, the election of an African-American president in a nation still deeply mired in racism and segregation, the financial crash of 2008 – whose magnitude we still haven't fully apprehended, and not least, the wave of uprisings that swept Egypt and much of the Arab world. That all of these took us by utter surprise, left (and continue to leave) us in great confusion, should lead us to doubt our capacities to understand the social world in which we live, much less adjudicate the various proposals made to apprehend these recent events. We might have to reassess the state of contemporary social theory, and question whether we have the analytic language we need to account for present times. Indeed, our social theory expertise seems futile with respect to the recent elections, the various renderings of which don't really add up. In the face of this, I have found the words of the following political commentator, whose work also conveys a skepticism of social-theory expertise, especially incisive:
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