Peirce, Abduction, Insight

Peirce suggests that familiar examples of Insight are only dramatic instances of a more prevalent fundamental cognitive process. On his analysis, Insight is a phase of a type of inference that he usually calls Abduction, and sometimes, Retroduction. Whereas Induction infers a nominal generalization from some specific phenomena, Abduction infers a cause of which the phenomena are effects. In other words, Abduction is the process of hypothesis-formulation, with Insight as the initial moments of that formulation. In the familiar examples of Insight, those moments are amplified, in proportion to the mystification that preceded them, so that the earlier stages of the inferential process tend to recede into the background. In less dramatic circumstances, argues Peirce, Abduction, and, hence, Insight, are ingredients in every perceptual judgment. For, every perceptual judgment is the product of an objectification of subjective experience, with the logical subject of the judgment being Abduced as the cause of the original experience, e. g. 'The ball is red' results from Abducing the ball as the cause of the experienced redness. Since for Peirce, the validity of an hypothesis consists entirely in its explanatory power, an unwitnessed crime, the cause of a sensation of red, and Gravity, which are sharply distinguished in some theories, can all be the objects of Insight.