The seduction of abduction: Peirce's theory of signs and indeterminacy in language

Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs is well known, but less well known is his notion of abduction, cited by Chomsky as a principle in first language acquisition. The paper sums up Peirce's three triads (firstness, secondness, thirdness; icon, index, symbol; abduction, induction, deduction), then goes on to link them with what Peirce calls the law of mind. The law of mind is then shown to have remarkable similarities with what Douglas Hofstadter, a researcher into artificial intelligence, calls subcognition, in that both involve abduction (iconfeelings attaching themselves to indices with a certain ‘arbitrary spontaneity’; patterns of neural firings triggering other patterns of neural firings, sometimes in ‘apparently random ways’). Abduction is seen as crucial to Jacques Derrida's principles of differance and dehiscence, and to the linguist Michael Halliday's view of language as particle, wave and field; and it may well prove to be a key concept in developing a linguistics of indeterminacy.