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ABDUCTING THE PROCESS OF ABDUCTING: AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Floyd Merrell (Purdue University, West Lafayette) REMOVE A LEG FROM THE SEMIOTIC TRIPOD, AND IT COLLAPSES. Unfortunately, the vast majority of scholars during the heyday of logical positivism and since, has essentially ignored abduction. James Harris (1992:60-6l) writes, and justifiably so, that if we adopt Peirce's distinction between abduction and induction, "then [Nelson Goodman's] new riddle of induction is properly viewed as a riddle of abduction." In a nutshell, Hume's dilemma was how to explain how what we have seen in the past can justify predictions regarding what we will see in the future. Goodman's riddle rests on how hypotheses are chosen for confirmation in the first place: shall we agree that "All emeralds are green" (i.e. "green" they've always been and they always will be) or "All emeralds are grue" (i.e. "green" before a certain time and "blue" thereafter)? Properly separating Goodman from Hume, and roughly we have Peirce's abduction-induction pair. "All emeralds are green" and "All emeralds are grue" are potentially equally confirmable "by evidence statements describing the same observations" according to inhabitants from two different speech communities (Goodman l965:74). All possibilities are there and waiting, as candidates for future abductive acts on a more or less equal and democratic basis. Once a selection has been made in the hypothetico-deductive arena, and given the temporal, asymmetrical, irreversible actualization of confirming inductive grasps, the game toward semiotic success has been initiated. The problem is that success, from whatever conceptual framework, can more often than not be made available. This is because abductions are in many cases deceptively enticing and promising. They are somewhat remotely comparable to Goodman's "similarities" (1976). Goodman claims that similarities, the same as regularities, are where they happen to be found, and they can be found virtually anywhere and at anytime. Similarities, like generalities, however, are no panacea, no royal road to success. In fact, though they might be "right" from some particular perspective, they are inevitably "wrong" from man other perspectives, for they could have always been other than what they are. In this light, Peirce also recognized that:
There is no greater nor more frequent mistake in practical logic than to suppose that things which resemble one another strongly in some respects are any the more likely for that to be alike in others.... The truth is, that any two things resemble one another just as strongly as any two others, if recondite resemblances are admitted. (CP:2.634)

The ultimate implications of Peirce's notion regarding his philosophy he intriguingly calls his "objective idealism" are no less radical than Goodman's comparable notion of similarity regarding his "nominalism." If virtually any and all resemblances, even the most blatant and the most recondite, stand a gaming chance of gaining entrance into the "semiotically real" (of Seconds) from a virtually aleatory background (of Firstness)--an element of which is present in even the most deterministic of worlds, according to Peirce--then there is no iron-clad, infallible method for determining before hand whether "All emeralds are green" or "All emeralds are grue"--or any other combination of likely candidates--will have the advantage. Neither possibility is necessarily any more likely or less likely than the other. But abductive intuition (literally, instinct, as Peirce occasionally called it) can at least give the vague promise of making it so. What is certain, following Peirce's "rule of predesignation," is that:
When we take all the characters into account, any pair of objects resemble one another in just as many particulars as any other pair. If we limit ourselves to such characters as have for us any importance, interest, or obviousness, then a synthetic conclusion may be drawn, but only on condition that the specimens by which we judge have been taken at random from the class in regard to which we are to form a judgment, and not selected as belonging to any sub-class. The induction only has its full force when the character concerned has been designated before examining the sample. (CP:6.4l3)

So an abduction (conjecture, guess, hypothesis) precedes a deduction (formal statement of a hypothesis), and only then do successive confirmatory acts (the inductive process) follow. A conjecture must be made as to whether emeralds are "green" or "grue" before there can be either a deduction regarding particular empirical grasps and the hypothesis following from them or an inductive process of confirmation. Regarding the ensuing confirmatory acts, Peirce gives the following example:
A chemist notices a surprising phenomenon. Now if he has a high admiration of Mill's Logic,... he must work on the principle that, under precisely the same circumstances, like phenomena are produced. Why does he then not note that this phenomenon was produced on such a day of the week, the planets presenting a certain configuration, his daughter having on a blue dress, he having dreamed of a white horse the night before, the milkman having been late that morning, and so on? The answer will be that in early days chemists did use to attend to some such circumstances, but that they have learned better. (CP:5.59l)

The "surprising phenomenon" can lead to a conjecture, which then spills into a hypothesis, and confirmatory acts ensue. But if the phenomenon of each and every confirmation is to be a truly legitimate repetition, then there must be sameness or at least resemblance of every aspect of that phenomenon when properly contextualized, down to the apparently most insignificant details. This becomes an impossibly drawn out task in Peirce's example, it would appear. Obviously, there must be a selection and what Goodman terms a "projection," which is in its initial stages a matter of abduction, not induction. Assuming "All emeralds are grue" might have been at some time in the past selected, then eventually, we must suppose it would have come in conflict with our ordinary

experience and replaced by the "projected" alternative "All emeralds are green." In other words, the "grue-green" dilemma regarding the "semiotically real" world of actualized signs is a matter of asymmetry, temporality, and irreversibility. An unexpected and contradictory event calls for a hypothesis's replacement by another one, thus testifying to the incompleteness of the conceptual scheme within which that hypothesis had dwelled. In the final analysis, the abduction-induction-deduction process does not aid and abet that oversimplified image of pragmatism in terms of "truth" as whatever happens to work or whatever happens to be in style. Peirce's pragmatism remains attuned to the future, to the general thrust of the entire community of dialogic semiotic agents. It is not simply a matter of what surprising turn of events happens to pop up in the here-now (abduction, Firstness), or what has happened in the past and how it predicts the future (induction, Secondness), but, in addition, how our conception and hence perception of signs will fare in the future as a consequence of signs present and signs past (Deduction, Thirdness). We must look into Goodman's riddle further. THE COGITATING MIND CAN OFTEN MAKE IT SO Ian Hacking (1993) gives account of Saul Kripke's (1982) correlating Goodman with Wittgenstein's skeptical problem. Kripke suggests that "grue" can be addressed not to induction but most properly to meaning. The question would not be "Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past, will be grue in the future?" but rather, the Wittgensteinian question "Who is to say that in the past I did not mean grue by 'green', so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, 'green'?" (Kripke 1982:58). In other words, in the past I called emeralds "green," but meant "grue," and now I continue to call them "green," but I actually mean "bleen" (in English, "blue"). And I now call the sky "blue," but actually mean "green" (that is, "grue"). Hacking points out that while Goodman's problem is outer directed with respect to what the community thinks and says, Kripke's is inner directed and virtually solipsistic: what I think and say. In this sense, his question becomes: Why do I call the sky "blue" and grass "green" when actually I mean "green" ("grue") and "blue" ("bleen") respectively? To be accepted by my peers or to impress my students? To save face? To avoid conflict? To keep on the good side of my superiors? To impress an attractive colleague? To keep a good Rortyan conversation going? Or simply to deceive my associates in my effort to play a good con game? Possibly any of the above, one would suspect, and there is an indefinite number of other reasons to boot, that is, according to Kripke's inner directed rendition of Goodman. If we take Goodman's original use of his riddle into full account, as does Hacking, then the entire community comes into the picture. As such, the question becomes: Would the majority or perhaps the entirety of the community to which I belong carry on the way I do? If each individual of a particular community were in step to the

tune of the community's band, it would be as if the tacit assumption on the part of the community as a collection of individual might be a variation on the above quote by Wittgenstein: Who is to say that in the past we did not all mean "grue" by "green"--even though we knew better--and none of us imagined that everybody else actually meant "grue" by "green"? We, as members of the community, could all be speaking out of the wrong side of our mouth for the sake of maintaining lines of communication intact without knowing that everyone else was doing the same. Our dialogue would be reduced to shambles. Nobody would be talking in good faith, but illicitly and for personal reasons. This would be a world in which everybody lies, but lies in basically the same way, hence the collection of lies becomes a strange form of "truth." It would also play havoc with John Searle's well-intentioned interlocutors, Richard Rorty's conversation would soon fall into chaos, and any form of a coherent and congenial community could hardly survive. There would be no method at all for knowing whether the community is progressing or retrogressing along its arduous push toward the goal-line of knowledge. Any smug confidence that what is known is knowledge rather than delusion would be itself more likely than not delusory. Ultimately, the problem with meaning is not in its proof but in its taste. Quite simply, if it goes untasted, virtually anything may be capable of going as a proof, and if virtually anything can be a proof, then whatever the taste may prove, it will more often than not be little more than superfluous. I allude to the inextricability, in good semiotic practices, of either the representamen, object, or interpretant, and of either Firstness, Secondness, or Thirdness, from the entire tripod of relations. The thorn in the side of meaning is that most popular accounts of the "grue-green" dilemma highlight either one or two legs of the tripod at the expense of the other(s). On the one hand, Goodman's riddle focuses on the "projection" of predicates on things, thereby bringing about "entrenchment," which is not a matter of "truth" or even meaning, per se, but of linguistic practice. On the other hand, Kripke's Goodman raises the question of meaning, if not exactly "truth," in addition to induction. Goodman evokes an attitude focusing more on actuals (Seconds), how they are most appropriately to be taken, once seen, and most specifically, how they should be clothed in linguistic garb (Thirds). Kripke's Goodman takes actuals in his stride as a matter of course; of more focal interest is the range of possibles (Firsts), and how, in their interaction with those actuals, they can in the future potentially give rise to alternatives (as Thirds) to the conventions that be. That is one difference between Goodman's "true grue" and Kripke's "Goodman's grue." Another important difference is that of "outer" directedness and "inner" directedness, to which I alluded above. Kripke, following Wittgenstein on rules, remains tied to consideration of thought-signs--in contrast to Goodman's emphasis on sign-events.

Peirce stands out most briskly when placed alongside the Goodman-Kripke pair rests in his nonlogocentric and nonlinguicentric refusal to eschew indexicality, and especially iconicity, from the entire picture. Peirce stressed long and hard that there is an iconic relation between the "semiotic object" that gives rise to an abduction and its attendant hypothesis, on the one hand, and that "semiotic object" as it is actually perceived, on the other. This relation is that of analogy or resemblance, proper to iconicity. Peirce offers the example of the similarity between the image of an ellipse and the data concerning the longitudes and latitudes of the revolution of Mars about the sun that allowed Kepler to draw up his abductive inference (CP:2.707). As a result of this abduction, a hypothesis was formulated, it conformed to the observations, and a new theory saw the light of day. As a consequence, the statement "The orbit is elliptical"--like "Emeralds are green (or grue)"--includes a predicate, or icon, as well as a subject, or index, as integral parts of the sentence (symbol). This is, of course, most proper to first-order logic. But since signs are incessantly in the process of becoming signs and building upon other signs, the most complex of them possessing the capacity to function as icons--sign corpora taken as self-contained, self-sufficient wholes--it also applies to a greater or lesser degree, I would suggest, to whatever conglomerate of signs might be available. With respect to self-contained, self-sufficient wholes as icons, we enter the domain of geometry of the non-Euclidean sort as developed during Peirce's time, especially Riemann geometry. ALL SIGNS THERE ALL AT ONCE Riemann geometry made way for the possibility of describing space of any number of dimensions and with arbitrary warps and woofs. It also revealed the possibility of multiply connected spaces by way of what are called in contemporary quantum theory "wormholes" (or in a manner of putting it, of travel "outside" ordinary space and time from one place to another place in the universe). Quite significantly, Peirce developed a comparable notion of "wormholes" in his theory of a "logic of continuity" and his general cosmology. A tangible illustration of the concept is quite simple--and it rather conveniently falls in line with a Peirce "thoughtexperiment." Stack a few sheets of paper one on top of the other, and you have

various two-dimensional universes as the mere possibility for the construction of art works, geometrical figures, scientific texts, mathematical proofs, philosophical treatises, or just meaningless doodling. Add an unlimited number of sheets to the stack and you have what Peirce called the "Book of Assertions." The stack of sheets making up this book is mere "nothingness," as Peirce puts it (recall the above allusion to space as "emptiness"). Now, from your own three-dimensional universe, with a paper punch make a circular hole in the first sheet--which Peirce calls the "initial sheet of assertion." You have entered the first universe of possible assertions. By sliding and warping your first sheet, it is possible to enter any spot on the second sheet or universe from one solitary point on your first universe. Punch a hole in the second universe, and you can enter the third universe at any point from that hole, which could in turn be entered from the hole in your first universe. Further holes--or "cuts" as Peirce calls them--in this and successive sheets allow you to "pass into worlds which, in the imaginary worlds of the other cuts, are themselves represented to be imaginary and false, but which may, for all that, be true, and therefore continuous with the sheet of assertion itself, although this is uncertain" (CP:4.512). Peirce invites us to regard the "ordinary blank sheet of assertion" as a film upon which there exists the as yet undeveloped photograph of all the possible "events" of the universe. But this is not a literal picture, for when we consider historically the range of "events" which have been asserted to be "true," we must conclude that this "book" can be none other than a continuum which must "clearly have more dimensions than a surface or even than a solid; and we will suppose it to be plastic, so that it can be deformed in all sorts of ways without the continuity and connection of parts being ever ruptured" (CP:4.512). The initial blank "sheet of assertion" of this "book" is itself a continuum that contains an infinity of possibilities. Peirce goes on to suggest that "cuts" in the "sheet of assertion" are statements relating to "events" in the world. These "cuts" are like a photographic plate that is subject to a scene "out there," which we desire to record. Moreover, since the sheet is plastic, it can be deformed in any way we like so as to yield more or less the world we wanted in the first place. In this manner, an infinity of worlds can come into our "semiotic reality" according to our collaboration within the flow of semiosis, and depending upon our desires, inclinations, preconceptions, and prejudices--that is, depending upon our "horizon," so to speak. Hence, Peirce suggests, the original photograph we might happen to take is, more appropriately, a map in which all points of a surface correspond to points on the next surface, and so on successively, and the continuity is preserved unbroken. Each point, each "cut," corresponds to the initial "sheet of assertion" where the "real" state of things (that is, perceived and conceived to be "real" at a given time and place) is represented. All successive sheets, then, represent an infinite set of potential "events" many or most of which can, at another time and place, become "real." And, in light of speculations by contemporary physicists themselves, the "wormholes" alluded to above are capable--like Peirce's "cuts"--of connecting one point in the three-dimensional universe within which we live and breathe with

another point light years away, and all in virtual instantaneity. This is theoretical speculation, of course, worthy of Alice in Wonderland for whom the "wormhole" was the looking glass as a passage from one universe to another. Yet it is serious business for physicists, and, therefore, I would expect, it should not simply be taken with a grain of salt. Riemann brought about an evaporation of the spell cast by Euclidean geometry over 2,000 years ago. By the same token, Peirces concept of the sign, if taken straight as pure spirits and without a chaser, is capable of dissolving the smoothly contoured ice of Cartesian vintage floating around in the drink and trying to pass itself off as finely honed, sharply cornered, and beautifully hexagonaled crystals of H2O. The universe of signs is actually as non-Cartesian (and non-Saussurean and non-Boolean to boot) as Riemann geometry is non-Euclidean. Indeed, it can be said that between approximately the years 1890 and 1910 Peirce realized the golden age of his intellectual output, and that literature, the arts, and the sciences realized the golden age of Riemann curved space: four-dimensional geometry. Riemann--and other geometries--entered avant garde circles in art, literature, and philosophy early in the present century, and it was appropriated by physicists, most notably Einstein with his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905. Now, comes the question: "What has all this to do with abduction, that, after all, is presumably the focus of this paper?" Yes, I'm trying to get there, eventually. But first let us consider a bizarre twist within non-Euclidean space. A CROSS-EYED LOOK AT SPACE H. A. C. Dobbs (1972) writes on the structure of the phenomenological "sensible present," that includes an imaginary or timeless conception of mathematical time and real, sensed time. He first alludes to experiments demonstrating that when the time between successive items of experience falls below a certain minimum level-about fifty milliseconds--it becomes impossible, given the torpidity of our perceptual faculties, to place them in simple linear order. He then proposes, in addition to the three dimensions of space, a spacelike temporal dimension, imaginary time, following Arthur Eddington's (1946) suggestion for relativity theory. This imaginary time is so called after imaginary numbers. It is static or mathematical. Then a fifth dimension becomes necessary, a dynamic time accounting for the real time of everyday life and of intuition. Imaginary time is not directed; it is merely a line in Euclidean space, a reversible order without any indication of a moving now: it is a static series of simultaneities, while real time is a directed, irreversible line with an arrow (see CP:6.111, 6:127-30). These time dimensions are most adequately conceptualized when related to numbers. The rational numbers are the whole integers. Irrational numbers are expressed in terms of infinite decimal expansions--such as 2. Imaginary numbers, such as -1, are those undecidables--amphibians between being and nonbeing, as Leibniz put it--that were stashed away in the closet for centuries because mathematicians were not sure what to do with them. Real numbers have

no imaginary parts and comprise the rational and irrational numbers. And complex numbers are of the form a + b -1, where a and b--called the modulus--consist of real numbers. Corresponding to these number categories, imaginary time--the fourth dimension--can be combined with real time to yield a complex time variable-the fifth dimension--whose order is partial rather than reversibly or irreversibly linear. Imaginary time is "dead" time, much like the time in the storage system of a computer. But it contains "expectations," all of them simultaneously held in memory or a storage bank, to be retrieved at a propitious moment--like a computer printout. It is the equivalent of "superposition" much in the order of the "superposed" possibilities of your seeing a Necker cube as either one of its manifestations or the other one. The two possibilities are there, in static "dead" or imaginary time. In real or psychological time, about fifty milliseconds, you actualize one of the two possibilities and thereby perceive and conceive it as a cube of such-and-such a nature. The possibilities were there, in a sort of trembling or twinkling pulsation of readiness--comparable to the optically illusory moir effect of op art. In fact, Dobbs uses the Necker cube to illustrate his hypothesis that transformation, in the mind, from one of the possible cubes to the other one and back again, is possible only within a fourth, static dimension (i.e. of the nature of Firstness). When combining this imaginary time dimension with the real time dimension to produce a complex time variable of partial order, near-simultaneity of distinct--complementary--events, such as the flip-flops of the Necker cube, can be perceived and conceived. In other words, the symmetrical, reversible, intransitive, nonlinear domain (storage bank), when combined with the symmetrical, irreversible, transitive, linear domain (printout), yields a dynamic, dyadic, pulsational this-that which is neither appropriately symmetrical nor asymmetrical, neither reversible nor irreversible, neither intransitive nor transitive, neither nonlinear nor linear (i.e. of the nature of Thirdness). This both-and, neither-nor, or either-or, depending on the vantage point, could well constitute the roots of time, and of consciousness and self consciousness (Kauffman 1986, Matte Blanco 1975, Varela 1979). It is, so to speak, Mbius-strip vacillation between "inside" and "outside," continuity and discontinuity, identity and difference. It was the geometer August Ferdinand Mbius who suggested in the nineteenth century that continuous transformations between incongruous three-dimensional counterparts--the Necker cube or Mbius-strip--are mathematically impossible within the three-dimensional manifold. Such transformations require rotation of the entire plane, not merely a line with the plane, which calls for an extra dimension. For example, along a line, no rotation can occur. Within a plane

(2-d), rotation can occur about a point in mathematical time (2-d + 1-t), and, within that plane, successive increments along the rotation can be experienced in real, psychological, or personal time (2-d + 1-t + time). Within a cube, rotation can occur about a line in mathematical time, requiring a fourth dimension (3-d + 1-t). Then, a fifth dimension is needed in order to account for real or experienced time (3-d + 1-t + time). As an example of Mbius's observation, a characteristic of complex numbers--the comgination of imaginary and real numbers--is that they have no simple linear order, nor is there any meaning in saying of a complex number that it is either positive or negative, or that it is larger or smaller than any other complex number. They are all there all at once (superposed), and as such, if no value has (yet) been assigned to them, they are ipso facto valueless. Complex numbers oscillate, vibrate, undulate, in a static wave pattern. They dwell in an enchanted mathematical realm. Their dancing back and forth as points along a real line or in a phase-space on a two-dimensional plane can produce a dynamic wave form as a hypercircle or hypersphere (a circle requiring a third dimension or a sphere requiring a fourth dimension for their becoming). Louis Kauffman and Francisco Varela (1980) demonstrate how this standing pattern can be the resulf of the complex numbers viewed in terms of a wave form by the oscillation of a + b -1 between a + b and a - b represented on the Cartesian plane (Figure 2). Technically speaking, oscillation is displayed as the circular orbiting of a point determined by a variable radius--itself determined by b-and by associating the orbit of each point, a, along the horizontal axis with a unit circle in the complex plane. In this manner, each orbit corresponds to two complex numbers, a b -1, where +1 and -1 are mathematically "degenerate" circles and -1 is the large unit (generated) circle. This geometrical display of the complex numbers expands the real number line (horizontal axis) not to the entire plane but to an oscilational toand-fro line with an infinity of dancing, synchronized circular orbits associated with each point on the line. What we have here is the one-dimensional representation of the real numbers, with the plane representing the complex numbers--the plane being necessary for the rotation of a real number (point, degenerate circle) to describe the authentic circles. The excluded-middle principle does not apply, so the scheme is general in the most general sense, and since all values and their opposites exist in a superposed state, the noncontradiction principle is inoperative, rendering the scheme at the same time vague. In short, Kauffman and Varela's equation depicts the ultimate in Peirce's sign generativity as well as the ultimate in degeneracy. Moreover, the whole conglomerate, slapped onto a two-dimensional flatland, is such that, from our 90-degree orthogonal perspective outside the plane, we can see the circles in the here-now all at once. Our 90-degree orthogonal grasp would be as inaccessible to strictly linear mnemonic thinking--such as a computer printout--as it would be to a flatlander dwelling within the flat surface. Linear

thinking could do no more than follow the generation of circles along the line, one after another. Such a linear computing system is probably no more phenomenologically concrete than a real number series, and the direction of its arrow would reflect not real time as we experience it but linear ordering of the most rudimentary sort. In contrast, our nonlinear, 90-degree orthogonal view of the hypercircle figure knows no definite serial order, for we are capable of seeing the two-dimensional scheme in one perceptual gulp. It is like viewing the juxtaposed grid of an op art object displaying its moir scintillation; we see it as if in simultaneity and nonlinearly. And, we must remember, a fourth dimension is necessary for rotation about the two-dimensional plane of the hypercircle figure to generate a hypersphere, which stretches our capacity for imaginary constructs beyond the limit. Thus, lest we become unduly smug over our phenomenal cerebral powers, we must remind ourselves that, within our own three dimensions of space and one dimension of real time (imaginary or mathematical time lies outside the linear becoming of our consciousness), we are able to reach no more than minuscule lumps from the whole of things, much like the hapless flatlander linearly assimilating, with excruciating torpidity from our point of view, the hypercircle pattern. We are, after all is said and done, helplessly constrained regarding our own world. Thought is chiefly sequential, successive, and one-dimensional, while our world presents itself as a multidimensional, nonsuccessive and nonlinear pattern of indescribable richness and variety, and the mind's every effort to grasp this world is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence. From a perspective beyond our own three dimensions of space and one of time, we would be only slightly more sophisticated than a pocket calculator programmed to spit out linear mathematical expensions. An imaginary demon from that "higher" perspective would look upon us much as we imagine the pathetic world of the flatlander. And now, comes the complaint: "We're still in netherland! Why don't you get to the point." Yes, I know. It would appear that I'm now lost in space. Let me try to get back home with another tangential move. HOW DO NEW IDEAS EMERGE? For Karl Popper (1959) and most positivists, novel ideas are the product of irrational flights of fancy, purely random happenings. There is no absolute guarantee, Popper writes, that one idea popping into one's head has any better change than any other idea of leading to truth. Knowledge is the result of blind guesses--Popper's Darwinian theory of "evolutionary epistemology." Peirce, in contrast, believed that feeling has its own "reasoning," though it is wellnigh inaccessible to the mind's reasoning. Fitting abduction into his general pragmatist philosophy, he once suggested that it is the instinctive capacity of the sufficiently prepared mind for informed guesses, for the mind has "a natural bent in accordance with nature" (CP:6.478). As a consequence, the "elements of every

concept enter into logical thought [imaginary time] at the gate of perception [real time] and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason" (CP:5.212). This "gate" of perception" can result from the outward clash of signs in the "real" world, but more likely it is the product of inwardly generated thought-signs. Perception in either case, is of the mode of Secondness. Since there is no wide-eyed, innocent perception, all percepts are accompanied by perceptual judgements. And since all seeing is at bottom level interpreting, there is no hard and fast line of demarcation between perception and knowledge (CP:5.184). There is, however, a distinction between abductive judgments and perceptual judgments: the former are usually subject to some degree of control, though they can also shade into the latter, which are by and large uncontrollable. What we seem to have here is a sort of tense logic (of consciousness and control, real time) and a nontense logic (of instinct, imaginary time), to which I alluded in the previous section. The reader who cavalierly takes Peirce's instinct (nontense logic) to be outmoded biological thinking has not read him closely, I would suggest. Instinct entails embedded tendencies as well as inborn propensities and proclivities. Tlthough quite obviously it cannot be specified--and Peirce, as far as I am aware, never denied this--it serves as a tool offering a conceptual grasp of an exceedingly complex phenomena, to wit, a nonconscious linkage of the qualitative Firstness of sign, object, and interpretant by resemblance, which allows the sign to suggest a hypothesis (abduction) to its interpreter-interpretant. Such a suggestion is prima facie beyond control, as are all instincts, though after the fact of its emergence, as Secondness and Thirdness, it can be subjected to increasing control. Thus a nonconscious linkage by Firstness can enable the interpreter-interpretant to interpret the sign in conjunction with the character of its object, such interpretation providing for the possibility of an alteration of feeling, action, and thought through self-control. On the other hand, embedded signs that have become instinctive or quasiinstinctive lie in the mind all at once in readiness to emerge at the propitious moment--ensemble rather than history. Speaking of this "presence" of mind, Peirce (CP:1.310) observes that:
all that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in the present instant. His whole life is in the present. But when he asks what is the content of the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what remains of it is greatly metamorphosed.... Indeed, although a feeling is immediate consciousness, that is, is whatever of consciousness there may be that is immediately present, yet there is no consciousness in it because it is instantaneous. For ... feeling is nothing but a quality, and a quality is not conscious: it is a mere possibility.

I must point out , however, that Peirce's concepts of the "immediate present" and "immediate consciousness" by no means suffer from the "myth of presence" or "logocentrism" (Merrell 1995). It is ensemble, granted. But the ensemble, having been thrown into real time, is never immediately available to the human agent. On

the contrary, there can be no more than a display of bits and pieces of the ensemble through a traveling time-slit in the "now" of things, beginning with feeling and culminating in knowing. Feeling, or the sign of Firstness, issues forth as a stream or not at all, though this stream may be vague. Although immediate, its specification can be made possible only after the fact and by way of mediating Thirdness. For example, an abduction emerging as feeling is at that point acritical, undoubting, and exceedingly vague, though on the spur of that particular moment it may seem to be a paragon of clarity (CP:5.446). And it might bring with it, as Secondness enters the scene, the shock of surprise, for it is entirely different from what was expected; it contradicts habit. Then and only then can an abduction emerge (within imaginary time), which can subsequently be put to the inductive test in everyday life situations (real time). This applies, I would suggest, to abductive acts from the most insignificant to major overhauls in the ways of societies or organisms, and of human knowledge. In order diagrammatically and spatially to illustrate the abductive process, allow me to begin at the most fundamental level. Consider the flip of a flattened Mbius strip in imaginary time as depicted in Figure 3 as a model of Henri Poincars discovery of the Fuchsian functions in mathematics. Poincar's (1914) lively account has him working on the problem for fifteen days without success. One evening, after drinking black coffee, he spent a sleepless night experiencing jumbles of ideas colliding until they interlocked convincing him that the tentative hypothesis he had constructed was incorrect. He then went on vacation, and, one day while boarding a bus, he suddenly realized that the Fuschian functions were identical to a set of functions that already existed in mathematics, the transformations of non-Euclidean geometry, which he could then use to solve his problem. Poincar claims that the incidents of travel put his mathematical work in cerebral limbo, where it gestated and gelled on its own, to surface at an unexpected moment. This is the nonlinear 90 orthogonal flips, the moment of abduction. His next, somewhat arduous task was that of patiently and in a more or less linear, continuous operation, taking up pen and ink and setting his discovery down on paper. This is the temporal, linear process. In other words, Poincar's discovery is patterned by flips of the Mbius strip, thus bringing a disarray of signs into a more benigh collection--order from chaos. Then, by smooth transitions--360 rotation on the plane of Figure 3--the signs could be manipulated to obtain the desired, and orderly, results. Similar experiences are legion: Kekul's discovery of the benzene ring experienced as intertwined snakes after a corree-drinking marathon; Coleridge's dream of Kubla Khan and his palace which, upon awakening from a

drug-induced slumber, so we are told, he wrote as if the composition were all there and awaiting its realization on the page; Mozart's melodies coming to him in their entirety in one massive clash. In each case, the flips within the ensemble of possible abductive signs occurred at the level of Firstness, where myriad thoughtsigns and sign-events are possible but none actualized. Smooth rotations on the plane are a continuous generation of signs in the sphere of Secondness and Thirdness. And so we're getting there, that is, to abduction, slowly. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH Semiosis begins with what Peirce called the qualisign, iconicity at its barest. If in the beginning was the word, that word, as a solitary evocation, was not yet a legitimate symbol: it needed interrelationships with other symbols and other signs before it could take on the status of a full-blown symbolic sign. Neither was it an index before its properly coming into relation with some "semiotic object" or other. In view of the previous section, initially a sign is a sign of and by abductive inference: it often comes as the result of a surprise, for its signness emerges where and when there was as yet no indication of signhood for some semiotic agent in some respect or capacity. At this rudimentary stage it is the ultimate in autonomy, self-containment, self-reflexivity, harmony, coherence. In other words, the sign is a mere sensation (First), then it is acknowledged as something other "out there" or "in here" (Second), and finally a surprise is registered (as a Third) because it appears that there is something rather than nothing and that this something is not what it would ordinarily be. Smugly confident of its ability to stand on its own (as qualisign, of Firstness), since it knows of no otherness (as sinsign, of Secondness), an initial sign--which is not yet a fully developed sign (as legisign, of Thirdness)-begins by re-iterating itself, and in this act it can then relate in good semiosic fashion to some other. But all this most likely remains aggravatingly obscure. Consider, then, an example. In line with abductive activity, suppose at a particular juncture in your life the surprising event A occurs. Then you notice that if A, then there is the possibility of B. And as a consequence you draw up the tenderly fallible conjecture (abduction): if A, then there are prima facie grounds for assuming that B. In case B is related to A by mere resemblance, you have no more than a vague sense of iconicity. If the relation is from A to B in terms of some space-time connection, indexicality enters your semiosic activity, and you can now begin the route to cumulative inductive practices. And if B enjoys a place in the conventions of some community of semiotic agents, then in all likelihood you will be able to relate it deductively to A by way of symbolicity (natural language), whether in "inner" or some form of "outer" dialogic exchange (CP:5.189). Of course the mind would ordinarily prefer to avoid surprises, except perhaps in play. The game of life is serious business, and, according to Peirce, it entails

incessant acts of abduction, induction, and deduction. Without them, there would be no life at all, which is, precisely, the unfolding of possibilities actualized and congealed into habits that constantly push the process along. During the course of events, vague possibilities (as Firsts) eventually take on breadth to become generalities (as Thirds). In other words, juxtaposed and often inconsistent signs are selected, actualized (into Seconds), and brought into relation with other signs to engender perpetually incomplete modes of mind and of action. This process, I must emphasize, begins with abduction, the only "creative act of mind" (CP:2.624), the "operation which introduces any new idea," for induction "does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of pure hypothesis" (CP:5.l7l). An abductive insight is the mere suggestion of learnability, which, when invested with a hypothesis, is tested for its accountability. If things go according to the best of expectations, then the mind is on its way toward knowing something it knew not. In sum, then, with respect to the three forms of inference, (1) abduction is the process whereby sensations become welded together ultimately to form a general idea, (2) induction entails habit formation whereby sensations as they are related to similar events (reaction on the part of some other) are combined into a general idea, and (3) deduction is the process by which a habit, as the result of abductive and inductive processes, becomes part of everyday conduct (CP:6.l44-46). It has become quite apparent that these processes tend to gravitate from vagueness to generality. Incorporating mind and body into the equation, in deduction the mind follows habits, usually according to pathways of least resistance and by virtue of which a general "idea" suggests some action. But this "idea" (Thirdness) is not strictly mental, disembodied, abstract, and autonomous of the world: it emerges as the result of a process given a particular direction by some sensation (Firstness), and the sensation was followed by some reaction (Secondness) from some other, whether of the physical world, the community, or the self's own "inner" other. The move from sensation to reaction to idea to action is not marked by ruptures, but rather, it is continuous. Corporeal capacities and tendencies merge into incorporeal capacities and tendencies, and vice versa, as one undivided whole. Along these lines, Peirce writes in his usual intriguing but obscure manner, with uncanny allusions and bizarre associations, that the way "the hind legs of a frog, separated from the rest of the body, reason," is "when you pinch them. It is the lowest form of psychical manifestation" (CP:6.l44). There is no "I think, therefore I am" here, but merely the mind of some rather vague "I think" flowing along in concert with--though at times dragged along by--the body, and the self of "I am" in incessant dialogue--whether amiable or agonistic--with its other self, its social other, and its physically "real" other. There is no "I respond to stimuli, therefore I think I think," but mind orchestrating--though often unwittingly playing second fiddle to--the body's comings and goings. In this manner, speaking of "mind" and "idea" in the same breath as the impulsive jerks of severed frog's legs is not epistemological heresy. What the frog legs do is fundamentally what we

do, the difference being that for the frog, the body, whether whole or dismembered, can hardly be budged from center stage, while our mind often deludes itself into thinking it has taken over the leading role and the body is merely along for the ride. However, the mind is not as paramount as we would like to think. Though Peirce's abduction-induction-deduction triad does not enjoy the central role in this inquiry, I bring it up in order briefly to illustrate the importance of all forms of Firstness to the flux of semiosis. All concepts, as generalities, are invariable incomplete and hence subject to further amendments or deletions, or they may simply be discarded if proved inadequate. This nature of concepts and so-called conceptual schemes can by no stretch of the imagination be divorced from vagueness, which liberally allows for polysemy, plurivocity, through metaphors and other rhetorical tropes. While by their very nature they embody inconsistency, these tropes are not therefore rendered meaningless, nonsensical, or "false." They are not mere place settings or hors d'oeuvres, but part of the main course. In this sense, iconicity lies embedded at the heart of things. If we can talk of meaning at all, it is due to this centrality of iconicity, composed of images, schemes (Peirce's diagrams), and metaphors. This centrality is germane to the ways of corporeal sensing and feeling as precursors to thoughts, concepts, and habits of mind and action. Linguistic or propositional knowing is possible solely as an outgrowth of nonlinguistic or nonpropositional processes. In other words, in light of previous arguments, symbolicity depends upon iconicity and indexicality for its very sustenance, Thirdness is made possible by the prior development of Firstness and Secondness, and legisigns owe their very existence to qualisigns and sinsigns. Ultimately, qualisigns and icons themselves depend for their existence on imagination. From imagination, sense is made of experience, which renders signs learnable in the first place. Imagination affords the tools for making semiotic worlds and giving account of them, and it gives rise to the ways of reasoning toward which knowledge of signs may be forthcoming. In fact, styles of reasoning themselves depend upon imagination, Firstness, which, as I shall argue in greater detail in the final chapter, is categorically ignored by "objectivist" philosophy. If meaning there be, then, it emerges from Firstness and encompasses the likes of unicorn images, unicorn schemes, and unicorn thought-signs, just as much as grue/green emeralds as images, schemes, and concepts. "Grue" and "green" as predicates all constantly collude, collide, collaborate, and conspire to bring about engenderment of meaning on the part of their respective semiotic agents and according to whatever contexts and conditions happen to emerge at a particular space-time juncture. Meaning consists in the relations emerging during sign engenderment and interpretation. It is not found in the relations between words and their referents, but first and foremost in relations of iconicity and indexicality, in feeling "in here" and sign-events either "in here" or "out there" before there are any thought-signs. We would like to think we are rational animals, capable willfully of generating the thought-signs that most effectively give our lives order and purpose. But before we are rational animals, we are rational animals. Our styles of reasoning are embodied

in our cultural patterns and propensities, our embedded habits and tacit everyday activities. Consequently, these styles of reasoning enable us to fabricate our worlds according to pathways of least resistance (the demands of Secondness), culturally inculcated imperatives (the necessities of Thirdness), and private idiosyncrasies, whims, and wishes (the desires of Firstness). The concrete "reasoning" of heart, soul, stomach, and even--and perhaps most emphatically-groin cannot be divorced from the abstract "reasoning" of mind. Feeling and sensing, and contact with hard core physical "reality" cannot but play a necessary part in the ethereal confines of intellection. Body and mind, subject and object, individual and community, nature and culture, are inextricably mixed. But I really must be more specific. So... TO THE MEAT OF THE ISSUE Although the empiricist side of Peirce winces at the mention of innate ideas, according to his postulate of a continuity between nature and mind and between mind and body, he makes no categorical break between the well-reasoned and logical formulation of a concept and that feel, familiar to us all, for what is correct: abduction thus takes its rightful place beside induction and deduction. If there are no innate ideas, at least there is, Peirce argues, an innate tendency for the mind to hit upon the correct answer in the face of a bewildering array of possible answers. And if innate ideas there must be, an idea's innateness most certainly "admits of degree, for it consists of the tendency of the idea to present itself to the mind" (CP:6.416). When the mind faces a problem, it begins searching for an answer, irnoring largely irrelevant date and homing in on more probable avenues, looking where it senses, feels, or intuits a solution must lie in wait. The process occurs at conscious and nonconscious levels, as sreports from those who have had great insights testify. For example,Poincar (1952:39) writes of "the subliminal self" that is "in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine." Poincar's observation echoes Peirce's notion, interspersed throughout his texts, that it is quite reasonable--though unfalsifiable--to assume the mind has a "natural light or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius" that allows it to arrive at hte correct answer. This is to be expected, for, Peirce tells us, the three categories of thought and the very existence of thought itself depend upon the fact that "human thought necessarily partakes of whatever character is diffused through the whole universe, and that its natural modes have some tendency to be the modes of action of the universe" (CP:1.351) Why should the mind not as much a part of nature as anything else? If it is, then there is no reason to believe that it must be reduced to compissible trial-and-error guesses when striving to comprehend nature. Of the three kinds of reasoning, corresponding to deduction, induction, and abduction, the first is necessary, "but it only professes to give us information concerning the matter of our own hypotheses and distinctly declares that, if we

want to know anything else, we must go elsewhere." The second depends upon probabilities, which can give no guarantees but, "like an insurance company, an endless multitude of insignificant risks." And the third is that "which lit the foot-steps of Galileo.... It is really an appeal to instinct. Thus reason, for all the frills it customarily wards, in vital crises, comes down upon its marror-bones to beg the succor of instinct" (CP:1.630). From the rational mind to the instinctive mind, thought occurs by one style of reason or another along the continuum from consciousness to nonconsciousness, from explicitness to implicitness, and from knowing that to knowing how. In a manner of speaking, the rational mind is immature, while the instinctive mind is mature (Rochberg-Halton 1986:10-11). The abductive inferences of the instinctive mind, of concrete reasonableness, are "acritically indubitable," though "invariably vague," since at the outset they are usually plagued with inconsistencies, and they are radically fallible as long as they are not given deductive scaffolding and put to the inductive test (CP:5.441-66). On the other hand, the rational mind is capable of progressing toward ever greater generality, but in spite of its Faustian, modernist desires for control and absolute knowledge, and given its finitude, the critical inferences that it generates are desting to remain incomplete. Unfortunately, the modern tendency to consider Cartesian introspection, rational argumentation, logical proof, and direct, objective, empirical "facts" as the final arbiters of knowledge ignores "sentiment," a feel for what is right, and concrete reasonableness, which are the source of all new knowledge by way of abduction (CP:1.615, 5.433). Suppression of (instinctive, habituated, sedimented, entrenched) knowing how by favoring (rational, propositional-computational) knowing that cannot but terminate in Whitehead's (1925) "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." It may well be that knowing how, by (1) the instinctive mind, and especially by (2) the sinking into nonconsciousness of explicit propositional and computational practices to become second nature, is a greater achievement of humankind than the conscious, intentional workings of the rational mind. Regarding (2), the capacity to view a Necker cube and other two-dimensional objects as three-dimensional, to encapsulate three-dimensional phenomena on a canvas with cubist techniques, to conceive of the earth as round and traveling around the sun, to take -1 for granted in description of "real-world" happenings, to accept infinity and the continuum as an intuitive matter of fact, are by no means negligible accomplishments when considering human culture at large. But I really must get on to yet a more concrete exemplification of abduction. THE MAXIM'S ROLE IN ABDUCTION, AND OTHER UNCERTAINTIES Deduction occurs as if within some atemporal setting. It is knowing what could be the case, if certain conditions were to inhere. Induction is the accumulation, within time, of knowing what is, according to the particular preconceptions, predispositions and proclivities, and whims and wishes, of the sign maker and

taker. Abduction is the timeless flash of knowing that which might possibly be, with no guarantees that this is so. Abduction, along with induction and deduction, comes into play when Peirce's "pragmatic maxim" is put to use. And, I would respectfully suggest, the maxim plays a role in as facets of semiosis, whether we are speaking of science, technology, the arts and humanities, or the coming and going of everyday life. In one of Peirce's rendition, which is the most commonly cited, we have the following:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (CP:5.402).

Notice how a combination of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness is implied in the maxim. We are asked to consider (Thirdness) the practical bearings of the effects (Secondness) that whatever is under consideration might conceivably have (Firstness). We have what we conceive would be or could be or should result if the perceived world were of such-and-such a nature, according to what we imagine might possibly be the case. But since what emerges out of our imaginative faculties is not only unpredictable but virtually without definite limits, the nature of what we would expect to ensue according to the myriad ways our world could be perceived and conceived would be equally unlimited, given all possible times and places, here and there and in the past, present, and future. The maxim, in this regard, plays on our imagining would might possible be the case in one of an unlimited number of contexts. So there can be no closure, since tomorrow might usher in some unforeseen possibilities of imagination that might end in new probabilities (of Thirdness) of actualization in the world (of Secondness). Abduction is a way of knowing what might be possible, and once knowing (and meaning) in the active sense enters the scene, then there is attention toward entrenchment and habituation of that knowing. But since abduction is an ongoing process and never entirely absent, then whatever codes or rules or modes of action are developed within a particular society, the possibility always exist for those codes, rules, or modes of action to be subverted in one form or another, indeed, in virtually an infinity of ways. Therefore it behooves us to lend an ear to Wittgenstein, regarding rules, who offers the folowing notorious opinion on rule following that has recently been the target of many heated debates:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by the rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. (Wittgenstein 1953:201).

Now, much controversial ink has been shed over the pros and cons, the virtues and vicissitudes, of Wittgenstein's so-called paradox--that not a small number of observers consider not a paradox but a dilemma over which we really need not lose any sleep. By no means do I wish to enter into this debate. Rather, the relevance of Wittgenstein's problem in regard to this inquiry bears on its implication of infinity.

How does infinity enter into the equation? It doesn't really enter, for it was there all along, that is, in the beginning, with Peirce's notion of continuity, the book of assertions, the indeterminable range of possibilities within Firstness. Or better put, from what Peirce calls the "nothingness" (the unbroken, faceless, emptiness continuum) prior to the becoming of anything at all there appears a "point," and from the solitary "point" an infinity of "points" can be engendered to compose a "line," from an infinity of "lines" a "plane" begins its becoming, from an infinity of "planes" a "cube" begins emerging, and from an infinity of "cubes" a "hypercube" begins the process of its becoming. This process is sensed in Peirce's marring of the continuum. A line, as metaphorical of this continuum, he writes, "contains no points until the continuity is broken by marking the points. In accordance with this it seems necessary to say that a continuum, where it is continuous and unbroken, contains no definite parts; that its parts are created in the act of defining them and the precise definition of them breaks the continuity" (CP:6.168). This primordial continuum, "is a collection of so vast a multitude that in the whole universe of possibility there is not room for them to retain their distinct identities; but they become welded into one another. Thus, the continuum is all that is possible, in what ever dimension it be continuous" (NEM:4.343). Where is the point to be placed that disrupts the continuum? Peirce offers the answer. There is "a possible, or potential, point-place wherever a point might be placed; but that which only may be is necessarily thereby indefinite, and as such, and in so far, and in thos respects, as it is such, it is not subject to the principle of contradiction" (CP:6.182). It is not subject to the principle of contradiction? Now how can this be? If in a zone subject to our contemplation there is green and not-green (or perhaps grue), then there must be an imaginary dividing line between what is and what is not. So, "what is the color of the dividing line; is it green or not? I should say that it is both green and not. 'But that violates the principle of contradiction, without which there can be no sense in anything.' Not at all; the principle of contradiction doesn't apply to possibilities. Possibly I shall vote for Roosevelt; possibly not. Geometrical limits are mere possibilities" (NEM:2.531). In an alternative to this "thought experiment," Peirce asks us to imagine he draws a chalk line on a blackboard. Then he writes that "the only line [that] is there is the line which forms the limit between the black surface and the white surface.... The boundary between the black and white is neither black, nor white, nor neither, nor both. It is the pairedness of the two. It is for the white the active Secondness of the black; for the black the active Secondness of the white" (CP:6.203). In the first case we have a rape of the principle of contradiction; in the second case we have a rape of the excluded-middle principle. Where is the logic in all this? Is there no order in Peirce's concept of the continuum? BODYMIND HAS ITS WAYS OF WHICH MIND ALONE IS IGNORANT In Figure 1 we had a graphic image of the becoming of the beingness of space and the beingness of its becoming. Notice that, with the exception of the bare point, all involve continua. This is significant. In the process from one continuum to the next we have an infinity of possibilities from which some undefined and undefinable

number of particulars can begin their becoming. I write "undefined" and "undefinable," since there is no way before the fact of the beginning of becoming one could have been aware of what would have been becoming. This is to say that from the range of possibilities Peirce on the one hand might have voted for Roosevelt and on the other hand he might not have voted for him. Suppose Peirce voted for Roosevelt. Well and good. A vote has been cast, Secondness saw fit to lay claim to a particular event, and that's that. Before the vote was cast, the range of possibilities was like the dividing line between green and not-green: it was both the one and the other, as possibility. The principle of contradiction simply does not apply. Peirce enjoyed the possibility of voting and not-voting for Teddy but voting for his competitor in the political arena. However, suppose that Peirce decided not to vote for Roosevelt, and to sustain voting for his competitor. In this case he neither voted for the one nor the other, hence the excluded-middle principle loses its force. Secondness emerged, an event transpired, and Thirdness, consisting of Peirce's opinion regarding the sorry state of all candidates, an interpretant, mediated between the event and the range of possibilities. As the possibilities of Firstness there is a both-and affair, and with respect to the mediation of Thirdness there is always a certain probability of a neither-nor affair. Now, a question concerning the relevance of all this to the idea of abduction has certainly forced itself into the mind of any and all readers. So, let's return to Wittgenstein's problem. No particular course of action can be absolutely determined by a rule implies that before any course of action (Secondness) is made, there is the indefinite range of possibilities (Firstness). Since there is no absolutely determining which of those possibilities is destined to emerge at a given juncture, there exists the possibility that either of a pair of contradictory courses of action might ensue. This would appear to conflict with the principle of contradiction, that is, in terms of possibilities as we have seen from Peirce. Assuming a particular course of action begins the becoming of its emergence into the light of day, at that point interpretation (Thirdness) of that course of action exists as no more than possibility, which is to say that between any two possible interpretations, some of them conflicting, a third one may emerge. This plays havoc with the excluded-middle principle in view of Peirce's words. If we place the Firstness of possibilities, the Secondness of action, and the Thirdness of interpretation within the process of abduction, the question becomes: When one is surprised by an unexpected turn of events, how can one know how properly to proceed or if one is following the proper rule? In order perhaps to come to grips with this problem, let's briefly return to the maxim, not as it is ordinarily taken by Peirce scholars but as it might be taken in light of Wittgenstein's problem. A surprise catches us off guard, for example, when making a turn on a country road we hit a patch of gravel and our car begins swerving. We react spontaneously, turning the wheels in the direction of the swerve. That's proper rule following. However, we hardly had time to "consider the effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings," we conceived "the object of our conception to have." We just did what we did, without botherint to think about it. Yet the body

thought, the bodymind, the bodymind as sign, bodymindsign. We did what we did because our obeying that particular rule of the road had become entrenched, habituated, sedimented, tacit. As Wittgenstein (1953:202) points our, "to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule." We obey the rule virtually in automaton fashion. A dilemma arose, we tacitly grasped the rule and followed it, and the desired effects were forthcoming. It is as if "our conception of these effects" were the "whole of our conception" of the situation at hand. However, the "course of action" could have been quite otherwise. Suddenly confused by the unwanted turn of events, we might have very tentatively turned the wheel in the direction of the car's spin, we might have turned the wheel away from it's spin, we might have slammed on the brakes, we might have shoved our foot on the accelerator pedal, we might have let go of the wheel and emitted a scream of anguish, we might have frozen, or whatever. There is no absolutely determinate way we could have foreseen our "course of action" and hence our possible failure to comply with the rule, in which case the bodymindsign might have deviated slightly to radically from the rule. There's no knowing for sure. That is what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote that we must obey a rule blindly, though there is no knowing when we unwittingly might deviate from the rule. Now I don't wish to contest the interpretations of Peirce's maxim that "consider" only the consciously, intentially, and cognitively derived "effects, that might conceivably..." when a problem situation confronts us. I am taking the maxim into everyday practices, where we have the possibility (Firstness) of indefinite responses to a problem, where by our action (Secondness) we obey or do not obey rules, and where we interpret (Thirdness) the rules implicitly, within particular contexts, and without having consciously, intentionally, and cognitively to think about them. In this light, a surprise overtakes bodymindsign, it acts as it will act, and success or failure is the outcome. The process of signs becoming signs, from Firstness to Secondness to Thirdness, takes places just as surely as if we had contemplated a problem, intellectualized a course of action according to some rule, and carried our action to its logical end finally to interpret our results. MAXIMIZING WITTGENSTEIN AND DEREGULATING THE MAXIM Now, let us do something radical. Let us combine the maxim and Wittgenstein's paradox thusly: This is the problem: no single practical bearing could be determinately interrelated, one-to-one, with a particular effect that our conception (imagination) of the object in question might have, because, given the whole of our conception (imagination) of all the possible effects that might be interrelated with that particular practical bearing, a host of alternate practical bearings could always be made out to interrelate with an indeterminate range of the effects, all those practical bearings and effects serving to make up the whole of our conception (imagination) of the object.

What do we have here? We have the implication that no single "practical bearing" is linearly connected (via Secondness) to a "particular effect" with respect to our imagination (Firstness) or conception (Thirdness). We take in the notion that the whole of our conception and imagination of the possible "practical bearings" and their "possible effects" is destined to incompleteness, either that or inconsistency, since there will remain an unlimited and indeterminable range of "practical bearings" and "effects" that our finite, fallible minds did not or were incapable of entertaining. We become aware of our limitations, our shortcomings, with the realization that the whole of our conception and imagination is a mere drop in the bucket with respect to everything possible. Above all, we slightly lift the veil to take a peek at abduction emerging, coming to the fore, evincing its paramount importance in the creative process of our conceiving and imagining. The implications present in the Wittgenstein-Peirce combination are a nonlinear range of possibilities rather than linear cause-andeffect sequences, unlimited interrelated, interdependent, interactivity between all possibilities and the "practical bearings" that will likely result from the "effects" produced by signs once they have become actualized. Moreover, community based conventional rules of thought and action may always vary, from time to time and from place to place. There is no predicting what the future will bring. This, I would submit, follows Ilya Prigogine's (1980, Prigogine and Stengers 1983) science of complexity, of order emerging from disorder, and of the unfathomability of it all. A butterfly flaps its wings hear an orchid in the Amazon basin, a slight perturbation is created in the air, the perturbation nonlinearly grows in intensity, and continues to grow. Finally, a hurricane occurs in the Caribben, and thousands of people are left homeless. All because of a humble butterfly. But of course the butterfly was not at fault. The natural train of indeterminably complex events just took their course. No physical law has been broken. Quite simply, the customary "rule" of conduct butterflies naturally tend to follow brought about dire effects. The president of the United States has a blemish on his nose and check it out at the hospital, and the DOW average takes a turn downward. A boisterous lad gets hit in the back of the head with a cup while watching a soccer match. A fight ensues, and eventually the entire stadium turns into a riot. In each case, unwritten "rules" of proper procedures vary, and unpredictable, though in principle deterministic, effects come about. In the final analysis, what about abduction? After all, that is what this essay is presumably about. An abduction appears as if out of the clear blue sky, as if we grasped it from some timeless orthogonal view within some virtually unfathomable other dimension, as depicted in Figures 2 and 3, as if we were somehow mentally and bodily to exercise an enigmatic and paradoxical flip of the Mbius strip, as if we were somehow somewhere and somewhen else. Indeed, it would appear, after all the above has been said and done, that abduction, and along with it induction and deduction, are the way of all signs, of bodymindsigns, of their daily comings and goings. I believe if we follow the spirit of Peirce's struggle against the body/mind and all other dualisms, we cannot but conclude that signs of cogitation,

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