The Six Blind Men Finally See

Those six blind guys and that ubiquitous elephant:
I want to start this chapter with a tale that I'm sure most of us have heard used to make any number of points -- the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Frankly, I had gotten to the point where I never wanted to hear it again, so it is somewhat amusing that I'm using it to frame this lesson. Such are the little ironies of life.
The story was first told in ancient China about three blind men, but by the time it migrated to India and became part of the Jainist folk tradition, the blind men had doubled to six. John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) wrote the following piece of doggerel which has since passed not only into the public domain, but has also graced countless bulletin boards, mimeograph machines, fax lines, word processors, web pages, and so on:

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against the broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me, but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The sixth no longer had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Six speakers talk about the six blind men
How are we to understand this little parable? One way to have a bit of fun at its expense. Let us suppose we are at a research conference somewhere, and we manage to bring together a panel of six people who have agreed to be discussants for this poem. They draw straws to determine the order of presentation, so there is nothing systematic about the order of their comments.
The first discussant:
"Why do we assume in this poem that blind people are stupid? What person, blind or otherwise, would hang onto any of these beliefs about elephants based on so little input? Is this really just a little story to tell us not to be as stupid as these blind men were, but told to make their stupidity so blatant that the story can be pretty shallow about a lot of things and the reader can still see its point?
"In other words, is this a story for the ordinarily stupid to congratulate themselves for not being extraordinarily stupid? I cannot imagine that any moderately reflective person can learn anything new from this story at the level of its stated moral.
"So, we must assume that when research teachers and other keepers of civilization drag out this little fable for our inspection, they are insisting that we dig deeper below this patently obvious surface. Or else we must assume that the level of wisdom in our field is pretty darn low."
The second discussant:
"What is this poem is saying about the nature of truth in the world? It is very easy to misread this fable as saying that there are many truths in the world. It is actually saying the exact opposite -- there is only one truth about the Elephant. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, an Elephant is an Elephant is an Elephant. Gertrude's rose has petals and stems and thorns, and we have to take all those things together when we have a rose. But we still must realize that we have a rose, not just an aggregation of stems and petals and thorns.
"Likewise, elephants have ears and tusks and tails and so on. But these things, taken apart, do not convey a sense of identity to the Elephant. Instead, once we know what an Elephant is, we can derive the pieces from our understanding of the whole. In other words, once we know the Master Plan, then we can show how the parts fit together."
The third discussant:
"Some of us are nervous with what was just said. In order to conclude that all the blind men are ultimately wrong, we have to be in some privileged position where we get to see the whole Elephant. If you can see the whole elephant, from what Hilary Putnam deridingly called a 'God's eye' position, then your perspective and your view are exactly equivalent to the truth.
"Here is the problem, however. Most of the time, we cannot see the whole. We do not have access to his special God's eye view. Maybe such a view does not exist, and maybe it cannot ever exist.
"Our task as inquirers, from this perspective, is to sew together some kind of elephant quilt. Each blind man brings his square, and the group convenes and tries to sew these pieces together to get some kind of more inclusive and holistic picture.
"So far, the emerging elephant quilt has a fan piece, and a snake piece, and a rope piece, and a wall piece, and a tree piece, and finally a spear piece. If our resultant quilt does not have the kind of satisfying depth we need in order to account for our expectations about elephants, then we need more quilters and more pieces in the project. In other words, if we have twelve blind men instead of six, our final picture would necessarily be richer.
"But how do we know we have enough squares? And if we think we have enough squares, have we just then re-invited the God's eye position for ourselves?"
The fourth discussant:
"We need to ask -- why these six blind men? Do they represent the sum total of blind men in this region? If they do not, why were they chosen over other blind men? Why, for example, were there no blind women? Would that have made a difference? How would the picture be different, if we were allowed to hear the voices of the other blind people who were not invited to participate in this exercise?
"Where do you draw the line in insisting on inclusion? Is it enough to include both men and women? Don't racial and ethic minorities have something to contribute? As a left-hander, I feel that my take on the world is much different from someone who is right-handed. Do we explore that dimension? At what point do we say, we have enough? And is this ever anything other than a political decision?"

The fifth discussant:
"The blind men failed because they could not properly measure what they needed to measure. Blindness, from this point of view, is relative. Good measuring skills compensate for the lack of being able to see the whole picture directly with their eyes. When these particular blind men used their sense of touch, they did so very haphazardly. Had they touched more carefully, and allowed their touch to linger, they would have been able to easily see, for instance, that the elephant's side had a different feel from a wall. It was warmer and moister to the touch than a wall would be, and this careful attention to detail, using the measuring system that was available, should have been enough to allow that particular blind man to rule out his first conclusion.
"But does this perspective still lock us into measuring what we can already measure, instead of looking for that which we may or may not be able to measure, and dealing with those consequences in a tactical way?"
The sixth discussant:
"Let us take the blind man who felt the elephant's knee and concluded that an elephant is like a tree. Why should he doubt this conclusion? What does it hurt him, to go through life thinking that an elephant is like a tree? Unless, of course, he decides at some point to try to cut down an elephant for firewood."
The pragmatic solution:
I have a confession to make. The sixth discussant is actually me. And since I still have the floor, I want to build upon these pragmatic comments as a means to enter into a discussion of the role of logic in qualitative research. So how is this poem about the six blind men an exercise in logic? And have we actually done justice to the real logic-in-use that most of us as inquirers would actually use in situations like this one?
My brief comments as a discussant were based on the basic points of a branch of philosophy known as Pragmatism. We have to be careful when we talk of Pragmatism, since there are so many variants (Mounce, 1997; Haack, 1998). In this lesson, and in subsequent lessons, we will use the term to refer to the founding branch of Pragmatism. This branch was developed by our old friend, C.S. Peirce (1955, 1992, 1998).
Peirce felt that Pragmatism was about meaning. Why do we pursue meaning in the world? Simply enough, meanings are what we use to build, maintain, support, and change our beliefs. Peirce acknowledged that we do not change our beliefs unless we are forced to do so.
What would make our blind man change his belief about the nature of elephants? Suppose, after one of the blind men touched the elephant, he returned to his hut only to find that his supply of firewood was dangerously low. So, he grabs his handy axe and sets off to find a tree to chop down and trim into firewood. It is a long walk to the forest, but the elephant is close by. Since the elephant is like a tree, why not cut it down and save himself a long and arduous walk?
I leave the consequences of the blind man's folly to your imagination. Let us be charitable and suppose that he manages to survive his mistake relatively intact. As he walks back to his hut, he realizes that he was wrong about the nature of elephants. More accurately, his belief about elephants was extended far beyond its original range of application. You can say that an elephant is like a tree in certain limited ways, but you cannot go from there to say that an elephant is equivalent to a tree.
We have learned previously that the world of experience is a generous place. Here is yet another example of that generosity. The blind man was walking around believing that elephants were equivalent to trees. All of his limited experience told him so. He was so sure of that belief that he confidently based his actions in the world of experience on that belief. But, because that belief was ultimately not true, it betrayed him when he put it into action. Sooner or later, said Peirce, all such beliefs will betray us. And we should feel grateful for this betrayal, since it at least points us away from previous error.
Genuine doubt:
The blind man did not feel all that grateful to the world of experience, however. He was in a state that Peirce called "genuine doubt". The blind man was sure he knew the score on elephants. But when he acted on his beliefs, they let him down. Now, he did not know what to believe.
Peirce rightly says that genuine doubt is unpleasant. I remember how unpleasant it was for me to realize that there were big, nasty-looking fish swimming in the apparently harmless pond in the Mameyes River in the Puerto Rican rainforest.
When we find ourselves in genuine doubt, all our instincts tell us to get out of that state and back to a state where things make sense again. It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum; in similar fashion, the human mind abhors a meaning vacuum. Peirce laid out four basic strategies to move from genuine doubt to a state of belief again. He called this procedure "the fixation of belief" (Peirce, 1955).
Fixing our beliefs:
The first and most primitive, and unfortunately one of the most common, strategies for fixing beliefs is the method of tenacity. Here, we get out of our state of genuine doubt by tenaciously hanging onto our original belief, and explaining away the doubt. In most cases, this act of explaining away has a future as well as a present dimension. That is, if we find ourselves in a circumstance where we are in a state of genuine doubt, and we tenaciously cling to our original belief and explain away the doubt, then we are careful in the future to avoid the sort of circumstances that led us into genuine doubt in the first place.
The second method for the fixation of belief Peirce called the method of authority. Here, we no longer depend on ourselves as the arbiters of belief. We turn instead to some collective understanding; one that we respect and upon which we are willing to trust our doubts. This is a better method, acknowledges Peirce, but it also has its share of problems. For one, there is no guarantee that an authority is legitimate. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that an authority, even if it is legitimate, is not acting in a conscious or unconscious self-serving manner. Finally, even if both of these concerns are allayed, there is no guarantee that an authority will be consistent. Authoritative claims tend to be claims resolving specific issues. Often, this sort of procedure loses sight of the larger need to be consistent.
What, then, is the best type of authority? One that responds to all issues in a consistent fashion. Furthermore, that fashion should be predictable by understanding the fundamental tenets of the authority. For this reason, Peirce called this third method the a priori method. As you can see, this insistence on consistency removes the problem of potential contradictions. But, says Peirce, it is possible for there to be any number of consistent a priori systems of thought to explain the basic nature of reality. For instance, there is Realism, and Nominalism, and Cartesianism, and Idealism, and any number of other perfectly nice Isms. How do you choose which one to pursue? Stephen Pepper(1942), in his landmark book World Hypotheses, holds that there are at least four adequately developed basic systems of thought, and that none of these four is strong enough to eliminate any of the other three. So, if we prefer this method of fixing belief, our choice of method will finally depend on our taste. Do we like the feel of Realism best, or are we more comfortable thinking Constructivist or Idealist or Nominalist thoughts?
Peirce held up the last method to be the best, and in fact the only valid, method for fixing belief. He called it the method of experiment, but it is probably better understood in today's terminology as the method of experience.
In the method of experience we have a very simple process -- we hold onto our beliefs as long as they serve us in the conduct of our lives. But we lead our lives so that we do not protect our beliefs from the test of experience. Any belief that is not true will, according to Peirce, eventually betray us in practice. When that happens, we will be in genuine doubt, and then we must modify our beliefs based on what our practice has shown us.


Back to the blind men:
So how does this method of experience apply to our six blind men? First of all, we need to accept them within the larger community of inquirers. According to Peirce, all genuine inquiry is collective, both socially and over time. No one person has the chance or the time to test each and every single belief by practice.
We can see this in relation to the blind men. Each has made a mistake about the physical nature of the elephant, but those mistakes will not show up until, or if, they betray some future practice the blind men engage in. So we must be patient, and allow the corrective nature of experience to work its "magic" on its own terms. If we push the blind men out of our community because we do not agree with them, then we lose the potential for modifying our beliefs according to their empirical experiences.
Second of all, we need to take the role of beliefs seriously in empirical inquiry. Too often, we have relegated belief to the category of opinion, or superstition, or bias, or some such impediment to real empirical inquiry. But if we commit ourselves to the method of experience, then we realize that our beliefs not only play a role in empirical inquiry, but that they are an absolutely necessary component of that process. Here is where Peirce attacked Descartes’ method of doubt, that Descartes used to build his famous "Cogito ergo sum." Peirce said that Descartes was dealing only in play doubt, or doubts that he raised in order to make his points. So what that Descartes claimed to doubt the reality of this senses, or even of the world? Descartes did not stop until he rebuilt each and every belief that he pretended to doubt. This is cleverness, but not empirical inquiry. Empirical inquiry deals with genuine doubts.
Finally, we need to understand how beliefs relate first to truth claims and then to formal principles of certainty. All three of the factors, namely beliefs, truths, and formal principles, are integral parts of any act of empirical inquiry. Furthermore, we need to learn how to orchestrate and maneuver these three dimensions when we do our own empirical inquiry. The art of such orchestrating and manuvering is precisely what we mean when we talk about logic.
Meaning is not truth and truth is not meaning:
Try this little experiment. Read several treatises on the foundations of empirical inquiry. Take note how often the terms "knowledge" and "meaning" are used interchangeably. Even more so, take note of how the verbs "knowing" and "understanding" are used as synonyms. But we cannot have a valid vision of qualitative inquiry if we insist on putting knowing and understanding together as equivalent concepts.
But, you might argue, aren't the acts of knowing and understanding inexorably linked in empirical inquiry? Yes, but they are not linked by any sort of equivalence. They are necessary parts of a greater process. This greater process is called intelligibility.
Intelligibility:
We can say that some empirical phenomenon is intelligible when; 1) we know its true aspects and any true consequences of its presence; 2) we understand why it is the way it is, on its own terms, and the significance of its nature, aspects and consequences and; 3) we can discern any necessary foundations or preconditions that need to be present for the phenomenon to exist in the first place.
Intelligibility has three irreducible dimensions, but, like the blind men and their elephant, we often try to reduce intelligibility to only one of these dimensions. When we wrestle solely with knowing and truth claims, then we are attempting to reduce intelligibility to epistemology. When we struggle with issues of understanding and significance, then we are in the realm of such meaning-oriented forms of inquiry as semantics, semiotics, and even qualitative inquiry. When we attempt to only discern foundational claims, then we approaching the matter of intelligibility as a form of ontology.
But how do we engage in the larger process of intelligibility? How do we avoid reducing intelligibility to either epistemology, ontology, or semantics? Once again, we can turn to Peirce. Peirce felt that the ideal, and in fact the only, tool for coordinating all these threads and initiatives into intelligibility was logic. But not the narrow version of logic we have come to expect in our day. He envisioned a form of logic where the issues of truth and certainty and meaning would require different sorts of logic, but where these different sorts were systematically related to one overall and overarching vision of logic as the tool of the seeker of intelligibility as a whole.
To see what Peirce meant, let us take a little stroll through some fairly unfamiliar woods.
A walk in the logical woods:
Let us suppose that one of our blind men decides to become an elephant researcher, and so he wants to make sure that we can finally come to a totally intelligible grasp of the nature and consequences of elephants.
His first step is to acknowledge that every time he makes a judgment about the way that something is, he is taking a step along the path of understanding. So, for example, he touches the elephant's knee and says that the elephant is like a tree. What is the nature of that claim? Is it a truth claim?
Not at all. The blind man is actually saying that he believes that an elephant is like a tree. Furthermore, why should he either abandon or modify that belief? Most likely, he will never be that close to an elephant again. That is, elephants are not going to play that much of a role in his day to day life, and so he can afford to hold unto what we know as an incomplete and inaccurate belief.
The alternative is to put in the effort he would need to find out what an elephant is really like. Before you condemn him for not putting in this effort, stop and think about how much effort he would really have to make to get to this point. For that matter, if we look at the most knowledgeable zoologist and world's expert on Indian elephants, she would be the first to admit that she is far from knowing what an elephant is really like.
So, what does our zoologist have that our blind man does not have? First, she has many more beliefs. These beliefs are based on her greater and more extensive access to experiences, both hers and others, regarding elephants. Some of those beliefs are so well established, and have held up for so many years and over so many circumstances, that she feels confident in considering them to be truth claims.
Truth claims carry a certain insistence to them that makes them appear to be more powerful to empirical inquirers. For instance, the claim that female elephants gestate for nearly two years is not an opinion. There is so much evidence, and that evidence has been so consistent for so many years, that it would be silly to argue against this claim just for the sake of argument. The burden of proof would be on you to find some thread of evidence that had not previously surfaced, which would change the way we look at gestation in elephants. I am not saying that such evidence does not exist; I am saying that you have to find it and bring it to the table before you can argue for its existence.
Not every claim is subject to alteration by further evidence, however. There are some claims that are necessarily true. That is, if these were not true each and every time they are employed, then inquiry and even life as we know it cannot function. These claims are called self-evident, in that their very existence is proof enough that they are true.
Logic consists of that set of procedures we can use to maneuver through the world of beliefs, truth claims, and certainties.
Sometimes, we need to see whether or not a certain belief can also stand as a truth claim. Sometimes, we need to see if a truth claim is capable of being seen as a certainty. But, just as often, we need to evaluate beliefs, truth claims, and certainties at their own levels.
How likely is a certain truth claim true? Or is it just merely true-looking? Once we are sure that a certainty is indeed certain, what are some of the implications of that certainty? And, most interestingly for us qualitative researchers, how do our given sets of beliefs approximate the sort of rich belief sets we would need to understand the world at greater and greater depth? Or are our collective beliefs too shallow to move us along other directions instead of the well-worn conceptual paths we are used to traveling?

The tapestry of logic:
When we start looking at beliefs, truth claims, and certainties, we start to realize that there is an interweaving of logical perspectives and logical procedures. Certainties require a logic of implication to help us figure out valid vs. invalid implications to draw from these self evident claims. Truth claims require a logic of verification to help us determine whether a claim is likely, probably, or unlikely to be true. Finally, beliefs require a logic of meaning to help us understand how to move from genuine doubt to belief in ways that serve our genuine attempts to understand the world in greater depth.
In other words, there is a logic to research, but there is also a logic of implication, a logic of verification, and a logic of meaning. Each of these logics have been worked out historically, and each has a fundamental strategy for dealing with the world of experience.
What is the Formal Logic of Qualitative Inquiry?
By now we see that qualitative inquiry is based not only on a new and unique vision but also on a new and different philosophical foundation. But our efforts, while nearly complete, are not quite done. Qualitative inquiry is also unique logically. This might actually be the most important part of this whole grounding process for those of us who are interested in the actual practice of qualitative research.
Every change in the way we do empirical inquiry is preceded by a change in logic. We will see that, during the era of natural philosophy, only deductive reasoning was considered valid. Crucial work in the Middle Ages set the stage for acknowledging that induction was also valid within a set of constraints and assumptions. Without induction, there would not be the Scientific Method or hypothesis testing as we understand it. Now, we are in the midst of understanding a third type of logic that has its own domain of legitimacy and use.
As we look at the history of the development of logical foundations for various modes of empirical inquiry, we can argue that there are three architects of the logic of inquiry in Western thought. Each person has started with a different set of assumptions, and has foregrounded a different type of logic. Among them, we can locate the major themes that have oriented our use of logic as empirical researchers.
The logic of implication:
The architect of the logic of implication was our old friend Aristotle (Adler, 1978; Robinson, 1995). We looked at his work earlier as the foundation for the type of moderate realism that served as the basis for speculative inquiry and natural philosophy. Now we are looking at him as the father of formal logic in Western thought.
For Aristotle, logic was much more than a tool for valid reasoning. The nature of logic was tied inextricably with the nature of reality. The weakest way to express this notion is to hold that an idea is true when it corresponds completely with reality. But Aristotle held that logic does more than establish such correspondences; it goes further to uncover implications that necessarily follow from what we already know about reality.
Aristotle was not just a reasoner about reality; he was an exemplary empirical inquirer and explorer. He advocated two processes for arriving at basic claims about empirical reality. First of all, he was an advocate of observation. Secondly, he held that we need to continue raising and answering important questions that arise from such acts of observation. As Adler (1978) puts it, in his discussion of Aristotle’s approach to inquiry in general:
"Philosophical thought began with the asking of questions -- questions that can be answered on the basis of our ordinary, everyday experience and with some reflection about that experience that results in a sharpening and refinement of our common sense (p. 4)."
Aristotle was not interested in developing an understanding of the empirical world unless it started with the obvious things that we all see and experience about the world -- the green grass, the blue sky, the compositions and natures of plants, animals, and ourselves.
But such commonsense observation must be enhanced with careful involvement in discovering the not so obvious. Sometimes the not so obvious is the unfamiliar -- the wondrous. Aristotle himself was the recipient of many such wonders and specimens from his most famous student, Alexander the Great.
However, even with adding the wondrous to the ordinary, he was still not willing to confine empirical inquiry just to the collection, the classification, and the labeling of phenomena. He understood that there were more general principles that were manifest particularly in ordinary and collective experience, and that these principles, once discovered, could be examined logically to deduce further facts and implications.
These derived implications were more often than not invisible to the ordinary gaze, since they were most often about general aspects of reality. These general aspects were not revealed in the observation of any single phenomenon, or even collection of phenomena, but only came out when more general principles were first ascertained.
How do we know when such general principles about the empirical world are indeed true? According to Aristotle, we first gather evidence that suggests that we are talking about something that does in fact exist. For instance, we cannot have an empirical inquiry into unicorns, since unicorns do not in fact exist. Once we have good evidence that something does indeed exist, then this evidence is organized via accepted principles of classification, so that we can be sure that we are dealing with something that is not in itself unique. But most importantly beyond this, we identify relevant self-evident claims.
For Aristotle, “self-evident” did not mean “obvious.” A self-evident claim is instead a claim that provides its own evidence for being true, since if we should hold that it were not true, then we would find ourselves inescapably making some form of error about the nature of reality. One example of a self-evident claim is the claim that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. What would it be like if this were not true? We cannot even offer an example of an experience to the contrary, or even what such an experience would be like. Therefore, we have no choice but to conclude that it is true. That is, once we can show that a claim is self-evident, then it is necessarily true.
Aristotle held that the role of logic in empirical inquiry was to derive true implications from true principles about the world. We start with self-evident claims based on observations about the empirical world. These serve as the major premises in Aristotle’s system. Once we have such general claims, then we can pair them with accurate observations that are explicitly linked to the major premises. We call such a claim a minor premise. If we have stated both the major and minor premises correctly, and they are both true in the ways that each can be true, then we can deduce a conclusion that not only is true, but is necessarily and certainly true. Here is a famous example:

All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man;
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

So, the manifestation of empirical inquiry, using this logical foundation, was to develop a systematic empirical inquiry into implication. So long as we have an accepted body of self-evident claims, then the art of empirical inquiry is to make relevant observations and deduce previously unknown implications by reasoning through the appropriate self-evident premises. Aristotle himself produced a number of such treatises; one of the most representative is his Parts of Animals.
In addition, Aristotelian empirical inquiry is fueled by realist philosophy as well as the deductive syllogistic reasoning procedures just described. It is realist because it holds that self-evident principles exist over and above their manifestation in any particular case. That is, Aristotle holds that major premises are not just likely or probable, but that they are necessarily true because they are real as universal principles about nature. Once we agree that these premises are real as principles and not just as labels for observed regularities, then we can hold that they are necessarily true. Something whose claim to reality is only based on its regular presence can at most be considered as being only contingently real, and its truth status is then a question of probability rather than certainty.
Aristotle became lost to Western thought for centuries, but when his works were rediscovered around the 12th century, he had as much impact on subsequent Medieval thought as he had had upon Classical inquirers. While, ironically enough, Aristotle himself was an atheist, his system fit perfectly with both theological and empirical thinkers in the Middle Ages. St. Thomas Aquinas was largely responsible for "Christianizing" the thought of Aristotle.
The use of categorical thinking and self-evident principles were particularly welcome. It is a simple adjustment to use biblical revelation as the basis for a particular claim to be self-evident, and so the Medieval inquirer was much more accustomed to looking to Scripture and similar treatises as a starting point for all inquiry -- including empirical inquiry. This is not because medieval empirical inquirers were lazy, or stupid, or too brainwashed by the Bible to do otherwise. It was because they needed self-evident principles to initiate an inquiry that would lead to the certainty they desired and expected, and from their logical perspective mere observation alone and the regularity of occurrence could not usually be trusted to do the job.
For centuries, empirical inquiry proceeded in an Aristotelian fashion. Suffice to say, the bulk of inquiry in the middle ages was not empirical. First of all, this was a period of theological interest primarily. Pressing issues on the nature of the life hereafter took precedence of research into everyday empirical phenomena. Second of all, self-evident principles are harder to identify and establish in the empirical realm. The body of evidence in revelation that is empirical is far less than the facts and claims about theological matters. Also, there are very few things that can be discerned by observation along that do not at least have some contingent dimension to them. We can claim that all people are mortal, for instance, but this claim is at least in part contingent on the fact that we have never directly observed any immortal people. Even if we have strong evidence that there are processes that occur that make it nearly impossible for any given human being not to die eventually, we have no way of knowing that these processes are indeed certainly the cause of mortality in every possible case, or that these processes operate in every human that has, or ever will, exist.
Therefore, it is no surprise that, as Western culture became more interested in the empirical world on its own terms, it became equally interested in a logical shift to support that interest that worked better than the prevailing Aristotelian model.
The logic of verification:
The search for the architect of the logic of verification is a bit more problematic . There are a number of valid candidates for that honor.
First of all, Roger Bacon deserves serious consideration. He was one of the first Western inquirers to call for experimentation as a way to determine empirical truth. He was also an early explorer of the nature and role of induction. Francis Bacon, with his work on systematizing induction and developing it as a logical standard for scientific inquiry, is also an excellent choice.
In the works of John Stuart Mill (1843/1988), however, we see the first real formation of a complete systematic empirical inquiry into truth qua verification. He proposed a model of the logic of empirical inquiry that is not only based on induction but also was explicitly designed to replace the deductive approach first articulated by Aristotle. In addition, he established the definitive role of the nature and role of causality as the conceptual aspect of verification in scientific inquiry.
For Mill, truth is an empirical claim that can be verified according to some level of probable certainty. It is also linked quite explicitly to the notion of causality.
Mill proposed five consequences that we can use to establish if a cause-effect relationship does indeed exist between two phenomena. Sahakian (1968) describes them as the five canons that Mill proposes to allow us to discriminate between a superstitious understanding of the world, which boldly enough implicitly includes all of Aristotle’s claims about nature and the empirical world, and real knowledge of causes that are themselves possible because of the sorts of uniformities that we can observe at every turn in nature. These methods address: 1) ascertaining whether or not two separate instances of a phenomenon share a particular prior circumstance in common (the method of agreement); 2) determining that the difference between whether or not a phenomenon is present or not can be traced to the presence or absence of some other phenomenon (the method of difference); 3) the intersection of the first two circumstances, which in effect show the operation of presence and absence systematically (the joint method of agreement and difference); 4) taking away a known antecedent to the current situation to see what the role of other antecedents are, causally (the method of residues); and finally; 5) determining that a variation in one variable, which reliably is matched with a variation in another variable, is due either to a causal relation or that the two are caused by some other common variable (the method of concomitant variations).
Mill’s work on linking induction and causality literally opened the way for modern science. Without this logical link, then induction will always lag behind deduction in terms of its practical applicability. But Mill put teeth into the concept of inductive reasoning by fashioning a model of causal reasoning, and by extension, causal modeling.
Finally, Mill combined his work on logic with Comte’s ideas on positivism, creating a universe that is held together by external cause -- effect relationships, and which is described theoretically by inductively verified experimental findings.
Contemporary physical science has abandoned this version of scientific modeling for the relativistic and quantum approaches, but contemporary social science is still strongly influenced by this blend of Comptean positivism and Mill’s vision of inductively delineated causal relationships among simple variables.
Peirce and the Logic of Meaning:
The architect for the logic of meaning is that seemingly ubiquitous presence among these chapters, namely Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce, as we have already seen, was a formidable philosopher. He also spent much of his life as a working scientist, and the only book he even published dealt with his long term research efforts in geodesics. But he always considered himself first and foremost a logician, and he saw his work in pragmatism and semiotics, for example, as an explicit development from his inquiries into the nature of logic.
Peirce’s work in logic was linked with his thoughts on the role of meaning in inquiry. The other key underlying dynamic in Peirce’s thought was the tendency which he himself labeled his “triadomania,” or his penchant to understand and describe everything in terms of multiples of threes.
Triadomania and the three categories:
Let us start with his triadomania. It manifests itself in his first major work, completed in 1867 when he was 28 years old, and presented to the New York Academy of Science. This paper is entitled “On a new list of categories.”
He begins by wondering how it is that all of the complex inputs from experience, and all the equally complex modifications of experience by perceptions and memory, should be reduced in consciousness to this over-riding feeling of the unity of experience which characterizes our day to day existence. He claims that this reconciliation occurs because of the interplay of three, and only three, categories of being.
The first category, which he calls Firstness, deals with pure quality, pure potentiality, or pure possibility. An example of Firstness is “the color red, before there was every any actual thing that was red in the universe.”
The second category, which he called Secondness, deals with unmediated, or brute, experience. An example of Secondness is any pure effect, regardless of our understanding or even awareness of its cause. For example, our sudden reaction to a loud sound in the night, which awakens us, before we can even attempt to make any attribution of cause or source of that sound, is an example of Secondness. Peirce claims that we, as inquirers, are required to have concepts which are grounded in some fashion in experience. This means that there is an aspect of Secondness to every concept, regardless how abstract or general.
The third category deals with relation, and Peirce called this Thirdness. Any habit or rule, or any sign, whether natural or conventional, is an example of Thirdness. Any human language, for instance, is an example of Thirdness. A word stands for its object only because there is a convention that makes it so. That is, there is nothing inherently in the sound "tree" that makes us think of those tall leafy branching plants we see in the world.
Note that there cannot be Secondness without Firstness, since there cannot be, for example, any sudden sound without the prior possibility of that sound. Likewise, there cannot be any Thirdness without Secondness, for reasons that Peirce addresses in some detail but which are too complex to go into here.
While it is important to note the interdependence of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, it is equally important to realize that Secondness cannot be reduced to Firstness, and Thirdness cannot be reduced to Secondness or some combination of Secondness and Firstness. We have to take each level of being seriously on its own terms.
The necessity of semiotics:
When Peirce realized that all things manifest these three categories to some degree, he needed a model of “threeness” to capture the inter-related nature of these categories for any identifiable thing. Here is where we find the notion of the sign and the theory of semiotics to describe and explain signs and sign action.
Contemporary semiotic theory was born twice, on two different continents, with two different orientations. Once you finally begin to understand semiotics you realize that it is an ancient way of understanding the world, but that fact is not at all apparent in its two contemporary forms.
The first father of semiotics, or the branch that we commonly call semiology, was a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure (1959). Saussure, working in Europe in the early part of the 20th century (he died at the age of 56 in 1913), revolutionized the science of linguistics. Before Saussure, the orientation of linguistics was historical. How are various languages related? What are their common ancestors? How have they evolved and changed over time? As important and interesting as these questions are, Saussure realized that they addressed only part of the situation of language. He was much more interested, not in where languages came from, but in how they were structured. What did all languages have in common? How do languages communicate meaning? What roles do languages play in life and culture?
To tackle the nature of language, Saussure needed a concept that was larger than language. Here is where the notion of semiology was born. Language, to Saussure, was perhaps the best single example of a system of signs. But it was certainly not the only such system. Each and every human culture was permeated by sign systems of various types and natures. Each of these sign systems allowed for the codification and communication of experience. Furthermore, the best way for us humans to understand such codes is to draw upon the wealth of understanding we possess about our primary code; that is, our native language. And so, by way of this process of codification and decoding, we begin to look for various “languages” within cultures. We have the language of dress, and the language of zoning, and the language of pop music, and the language of urban legends, and the language of academic dress and conduct, and on and on. It is the role of the semiologist to look upon a given culture as a vast interconnected series of texts, and to understand what each text is saying and how these texts impinge and interact with one another to communicate and represent rich and subtle markings and understandings about that culture. It is interesting to note that Saussure died before he could encapsulate his work into a definitive text of its own. His book, Course in general linguistics (1959), is actually a compendium of class notes put together by his students as a posthumous way to capture and preserve his genius. His influence has been enormous over the past 80 years. Some of his chief descendants and developers include Claude Levi-Strauss, Sir Edmund Leach, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Hlemslev, Roman Jakobson, Paul Riceour, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Umberto Eco. In short, everywhere we see the notion of the sign as a code, and semiotics as the reading of that code, we find the hand of Saussure in some fashion.
The second trunk of contemporary semiotics is that branch that took root, not in Europe, but in America. Its founder was Charles Sanders Peirce, whom we have considered in some detail before. As you may remember, Peirce was first and foremost a logician. So it comes as no surprise that his understanding of semiotics is logical in nature. In fact, Peirce makes the startling claim that logic itself is just another name for semiotics, or the quasi-necessary doctrine of signs.
What did Peirce mean by saying that logic and semiotics are equivalent? Many things, actually. First of all, he sees that meaning is not so much a creation of the human mind, but something that is part and parcel of the reality of a given phenomenon. That is, meaning is a logical consequence of something being the way it is, where it is, at the time that it exists. This, in itself, has a number of important implications. First of all, this leads us to reject the notion that an event or phenomenon is devoid of meaning unless we put it there. Second, it also requires us to reject the position that the world is a meaning-sparse venue. To the contrary, the world is rich in actual and potential meaning; so much so, that the effort to understand the meaning of some event or phenomenon definitively and exhaustively is doomed to failure at the outset. Thirdly, we reject the notion that meaning is inherently and always a subjective imposition on the world by us. It is true that we can and do interpret the world as we find it, but that interpretation is less subjective and less free form than we might suppose. That is, we might be quite free at the outset, but once we engage in an inquiry into meaning using the conditions we establish at the outset, the consequences will be anything but arbitrary. This is because there is a logic to meaning, and a logic that drives interpretation. All of this is due to the fact that there are systematic ways that things operate as signs, and systematic consequences of these operations.
What is the fundamental logical nature of a sign? Here, in simplified form, is what Peirce says. A sign consists of three parts. The first part is the object, or what the sign stands for. The object is always implicit; if it were explicit, then we would have a different and simpler relationship. The second part is the sign proper, which is explicit. But, even though it is explicit, it always points away from itself and toward the object. That is, the role of the sign is to make the unseen object present in some fashion. Finally, we have the interpretant. The interpretant is the consequence of the sign acting as a sign. Sometimes, the interpretant is an interpretation on the part of some reader of the sign. Sometimes, it is just an aspect of the nature of the reality of a particular situation.
Consider the following equation as another way to say what we have said above. If we have an object, and a sign representing that object, then we have some kind of effect that we call the interpretant. Or:

If Object, by Sign, then Interpretant.

What happens if we drop the sign out of this equation? We are then left with a simple “if-then” statement, where the object is the antecedent and the interpretant is the consequent. But in the semiotic equation, we rule out any direct link between the object and the interpretant. In this case, the object is a type of antecedent, but it is an antecedent that can never be directly involved in the interaction. It is only involved by the mediating action of the sign. Since the sign exists, it has its own set of properties and its own nature. Part of the potential of this thing, however, is the fact that it can act as a sign. As such, it represents, but is not equivalent to, the object. That is, it brings the object to bear, but only in a mediated way. If the object were actually there, it would bring about its own and different effect. Finally, we see that the interpretant is a mediated consequent. It is the consequence that comes about because the object is brought to bear through the presence of the sign, and not in and of itself.
While the process described above sounds inordinately complex, it describes a whole variety of ordinary phenomena on their own terms, and as simply as they can legitimately be understood. Furthermore, it implies that the world is not a place full of abstract facts that have a certain truth functional status. Instead, it says that the world is, in Peirce’s term, “perfused” with signs. Everywhere we look, we see these mediated phenomena. We have special names for them in the empirical world. We call them clues, or omens, or symptoms, or patterns, or stories, or fables, or epiphanies, or synchronicities, or what have you. They are the fabric and building blocks of meaning, and without them we would have no inquiry at all.
I would like to make the following bold claim: it is impossible to understand qualitative research, or to do it properly, without engaging in semiotic concepts and methods. Rather than making a long-winded defense of this claim, I would like to prove it by illustration. That is, I want to talk about the family of signs that are possible in the empirical world, and to demonstrate that this family is fundamental and essential to a genuine qualitative inquiry. Furthermore, they show that semiotic theory functions as the proper foundation for building a comprehensive qualitative perspective, a perspective that the field currently does not have and so desperately needs.
The interplay of being and logic in inquiry:
The end result of all of this discussion is the notion that our categories of understanding, since they are affected by states of being, incorporate the dynamics of possibility, existence, and order at every turn. Everything that we can experience or even imagine consists in some fashion of this dynamic interplay. This interplay is what we mean by signs, and semiosis.
Can we turn this interplay to our understanding of the use of logic in empirical inquiry? Of course we can, and when we do, we discover some interesting new aspects to this enterprise.
Making room for abduction:
As a matter of fact, it opens up an explicit understanding of a third type of logical reasoning, necessitated by the notion of three irreducible modes of being, which had never been systematized or even identified prior to Peirce.
We have already argued that deduction is the logic of implication. We can further claim that deduction foregrounds our ideas of Thirdness, since implication is by definition formal and relational. Here we are speaking of perfect Thirdnesses. A perfect Thirdness has to be true by its own nature. The order it provides is irreplaceable. If this is true of some perfect Thirdness, then it has to be true. Therefore, any implication that we can derive from it, so long as that implication is deductively valid, will also have to be true. Remember, this project of implication from perfect Thirds (or self evident claims) is not something we do anymore in contemporary empirical inquiry. Instead, we approximate by making deductive implications from very, very, very likely claims.
When we return to the logic of verification, or induction, we can now see that induction foregrounds Secondness. Induction starts with the observation, which has as its starting point the notion of unmediated brute fact. That is, inductive research, as best typified by scientific inquiry, does not lock in a theory and then force the facts to fit the theory. It looks carefully at each and every fact to see if there is some previously unexplained, or in a sense "brute" aspect to that fact. If there is, the scientist puts that fact outside of the theory in question, and starts to look for other facts that might be grouped with this new and unexplained observation. Also, this mode of reasoning pays homage to Secondness in its awareness that any theory, or Thirdness, should be discarded if there is enough renegade evidence, or unexplained Secondness, associated with it.
But what sort of reasoning foregrounds Firstness? If Peirce is right about the interplay of possibility and existence and order, then we need to find some previously undiscovered but now necessary mode of reasoning.
Rules of reasoning:
To understand this new and undiscovered mode of reasoning, we need to talk about the two more familiar modes in a more systematic fashion. Peirce himself does so with the following comparative example. Suppose we have a bag of beans. Suppose, furthermore, that we have conclusively established that each and every bean in this bag is white. Now, consider the following cases. First of all:

Rule: All the beans in this bag are white.
Case: This bean is from the bag.
Result: This bean is white.

This is a deduction. In fact, we can deduce that this bean must be white, or is necessarily white, so long as the rule and the case are true.
Now, let us consider the next example:

Case: This bean is from the bag.
Result: This bean is white.
Rule: All the beans in the bag are white.

Here, we have an inductive conclusion. Notice that the result is more properly understood as a judgment about some observable property of the case; in this situation, that it is white. From this, we induce the following contingent rule, that all the beans in the bag are white. Is this rule necessarily true, or even certain in this case? Of course not. At best, it is probably true. Its likelihood increases as we sample more and more cases, and they continue to uphold the rule.
Finally, we have the third example, the one that Peirce uncovered:

Result: This bean is white.
Rule: All the beans in the bag are white.
Case: This bean is from the bag.

Here we have an example of what Peirce called abductive reasoning. At first blush, it looks like nothing more than an erroneous induction. But on more careful examination, it reveals a bit more of its unusual nature to us. First of all, it starts with the result. In this case, the result is really nothing more than a suspicion that the observation we see before us has an unrevealed aspect to its nature that causes us to misunderstand it in some fundamental way. The most obvious form of misunderstanding is doubt caused by the unexpected presence or nature of the result. In and of itself, we do not understand it, or else our understanding of it is too truncated for comfort. What do we do in such a case? We start looking for some necessary or contingent rule to address this lack of understanding more directly. In this case, we do not know what to make of the fact that the bean is white. Are we really understanding all we need to understand about the bean? But, lo, we happen to remember or find out that all the beans in the bag are white. So, from these pieces, we abduce that the bean is possibility, or perhaps plausibly, from the bag. In other words, this bean is not some unique white bean existing somewhere in the world, but is possibly better understood if we hypothesize that it came from this bag of white beans. What have we gained from such an endeavor? Simply put, we now have a richer possibility map when thinking about the bean. We are in no way certain that the bean came from the bag, or even that it is likely that the bean came from the bag. Rather, we conclude that it is meaningful to suppose that the bean might have come from the bag. Here we have the beginnings of an inquiry into meaning on its own terms.
The ten classes of signs and the six modes of abduction:
One of the key theorems that Peirce proved, regarding semiotic theory, is that there are ten, and only ten, classes of signs. This is not too terribly difficult to prove, but the proof is time-consuming and requires the addition and consideration of a number of concepts that we need not address for our purposes. Therefore, I ask you to simply accept the proof as true for the time being, so that we can consider its consequences.
We can best understand these ten classes as being spread across three different families of signs; the Open family, the Actual family, and the Necessary family. The Open family is the biggest, in that it encompasses six of the ten sign classes. The Actual family deals with three sign classes, and the Necessary has only one, but one very important, sign class member.
Interwoven within the three Families are three Tribes, and finally three Natures. The three tribes are the Iconic tribe, the Indexical tribe, and the Symbolic tribe. The Open family makes a place for all three tribes, the Actual family has room for only the Indexical and Symbolic tribes, and the Necessary family excludes all but the Symbolic tribe. The three natures are the Tone nature, the Token nature, and the Type nature. Again, the Open family has a place for all three natures, the Actual family only has room for signs that have Token and Type natures, and the Necessary family only allows for signs that are Types by nature.
Now we get to the exciting part. Each of these ten sign classes corresponds, in empirical inquiry, to an outcome of a certain type of inquiry activity. By looking at all ten classes, we have a comprehensive model of empirical inquiry in practice.
But we are not going to be that ambitious here. Instead, we will concentrate on the six classes that we call the Open family. We will argue that these classes encompass the sorts of activities we do when we engage in an empirical inquiry into meaning. Furthermore, this breakdown will allow us to see how these aspects of an inquiry into meaning not only relate to each other, but how they can relate and feed into an empirical inquiry into truth and into necessary implication.
Let us start by giving each member of the Open family its own name. We have: 1) the Open Iconic Tone; 2) the Open Iconic Token; 3) the Open Iconic Type; 4) the Open Indexical Token; 5) the Open Indexical Type; and 6) the Open Symbolic Type. More importantly, what does each of these sign classes capture about the meaningfulness of the world, and the way that empirical inquirers approach and wrestle with that meaning? Let us take each class in turn.
The hunch:
First we have the Open Iconic Tone. Any time we have an Open sign, we do not have a specific object in mind, but instead a domain of possible objects. A sign is a member of the Iconic tribe when it stands for an object by resembling that object in some fashion. A sign has a tone nature when the consequence is never an actual consequence, but only the possibility of a consequence. Putting all of this together, we get, when we have an Open Iconic Tone, the possibility of a possibility of a resemblance. What sort of inference is this? It is precisely the sort of inference that is at the heart of the type of act of empirical inquiry that we call a “hunch.” We are not pinpointing any particular object in reality; we are instead exploring the possibility of what such an object might be like, if it were involved. When we explore hunches, we are laying out the broad framework of our inquiry. Is it possible to do this explicitly and systematically? Only if we understand the nature of the process. This is why it is important to articulate these classes of inference, not only to show their natures, but to suggest how they can be related systematically to other modes of meaningful inference.
The omen:
What do we have when we have an Open Iconic Token? Again, we are still in the realm of a possible, rather than an actual, object. Again, we are claiming that the manifest sign is linked to a possible object via resemblance of some form. But now, we are claiming that something we see here and now is fruitfully considered to be the consequence of some possible sign relation. That is, unlike the hunch where we are not even willing to say that we actually have a sign, in this case we have something in empirical reality that we start with. Does it resemble something else, and if it does, does that act of resemblance indicate a sign? Here we have the inferential process that underlies the act of empirical inquiry that underlies the reconciliation of meaning via the reading of omens. Like a hunch, the sign is pushed into the future, but unlike the hunch, there is something that is present here and now that explicitly triggers the process. It may be the entrails of a sheep, or it may be a strange fluctuation in the price of a particular stock. Either way, it just may be pointing to something down the line.
The metaphor:
The third and last member of the Iconic tribe in the Open family is the Open Iconic Type. When we are dealing with a Type, then we are considering a phenomenon in the world of experience not for its nature hear and now, but in terms of its more abstract nature. In the case of resemblance, we are dealing with an almost law-like set of consequences when this particular resemblance is considered in relation to a possible object. This is precisely the sort of reasoning we engage in when we consider a particular class of phenomena as being a metaphor for something else. That is, what sorts of insights and understandings do we foreground and bring to awareness when we consider one thing to be a metaphor for another thing? Note that we do not think that there is any actual relation between the metaphor and the process metaphorized. We are simply exploiting a possible resemblance to uncover aspects of the thing metaphorized that we could not explore in any other way.
The clue:
What is the nature of the Open Indexical Token? Like the Open Iconic Token, we have something that is actually in experience that suggests that it might be a sign. This time, the sign points to its object by virtue of the impact of the object on the sign. The problem is that we do not know exactly what object the sign signifies. Here, we have the inferential process that underlies such phenomena as clues, or symptoms. In the case of a symptom, the object, while hidden, exists here and now, and with the clue, the object is in the past. Either way, we look on the thing or event in experience in a new light. The ancient and venerable acts of empirical inquiry known as diagnosis and detection center around the inquiry into meaning which involves the study of clues and symptoms.
The pattern:
What is the nature of the Open Indexical Type? Again, when we deal with types, we are moving away from the particular event or phenomenon to some larger and more abstract picture. What do we get when we do this with a bunch of clues or symptoms? Simply out, we are reasoning to a pattern. This is an extremely important type of inference in empirical inquiry, but one which we have previously assumed, along with such skills as making good hunches and seeing fruitful metaphors, to be part of the experiential “craft” of research and not a domain of inference in its own right. What is the difference between a pattern and a hypothesis in empirical inquiry? Simply put, a pattern is an exercise in meaningful plausibility that either helps us frame the domain of meaning that we can later explore by verification by using a hypothesis, or else where understanding is necessary but no verification can be made. We can see examples of the latter in the exploration of the roles of fables and folklore and urban legends in culture. All of these phenomena come under the general heading of myths, which are themselves accounts whose historical veracity is irrelevant to the nature and importance of the account.
The explanation:
Finally, we have the last, and most abstract, form of Open inference. What is the nature of the Open Symbolic Type? Here, we have the abductive equivalent to the hypothesis in scientific research and the categorical syllogism in speculative research. We come up with open symbolic types when we reason to an explanation. I will not dwell on this point very long, except to point out that there is an inherent structural affinity between the explanation, which is in the realm of meaning, and the hypothesis, which is grounded ultimately in the realm of verification. In is in the interface between these two that the only possibility for a legitimate mix between meaning research and verification research can exist.

Mixing and matching abductive reasoning tools:
These six classes of signs are the building blocks of any empirical inquiry into meaning. Furthermore, by understanding their natures, and their relations not only to each other but to the other four classes which we have not described but which in fact deal with the logic of verification and the logic of implication, we have the first comprehensive model of the nature of inferences available for any model of empirical inquiry in use. And finally, by laying out three important but independent families, we have made a place for qualitative, quantitative, and speculative inquirers to work without fighting needless and counterproductive turf wars. And as you have seen, at least with the Open family, this work is not just classificatory and abstract, but practical and capable of guiding the inquirer in new and insightful ways.
Prove me right!
When I finally finished the chapter above, I almost abandoned it. This is too technical and too hard to include. You just might stop reading here and toss up your hands in despair.
So I thought maybe I could tone it down. You know, simplify it by changing points to make them easier to understand. The problem is this: all of these issues are related. If you change one, or eliminate another, you change the whole meaning of the system.
Therefore, in the end, I decided to leave the chapter as it is. It is, of course, the most intellectually challenging chapter in the whole book. But there are a few ways that you can improve your understanding of this material:
• Go first to the abductive reasoning exercises, and try them. Create a few metaphors, look for some omens, and juxtapose a few unrelated concepts. Get a tangible feel for this process, and then go back and re-read the discussion of these types of phenomena.
• Don't despair when we read something and you don't get it right away. Some ideas are just so different that you need time to allow them to incubate and percolate. For instance, it took me years to understand what Peirce meant when he called semiotics the "quasi-necessary doctrine of signs.' Why quasi-necessary? What did that even mean? He meant that if we took the doctrine of signs to be "necessary" then we just had another name for foundationalism, like Aristotle's work, but if we just called it "a doctrine of signs" then we lost track of the important notion that our understanding of signs is shaped by watching them in action in the world of experience, and we run the risk of letting the doctrine of signs be just a "creation" of our minds which we could then lay upon the world. He struck a perfect balance with the phrase "quasi-necessary" and once I finally understood it, the understanding was worth all the fretting and hard mental work.
• It is important to work together. Draw diagrams, compare notes, argue, read further, and ask questions. One person may grasp one point, where another might see another subtle little turn. If you put our thoughts together, you can avoid the blind man and the elephant trap, at least to some degree.
• Finally, have fun. We live in an anti-intellectual age, but that does not mean that you have to buy into that set of assumptions. A good friend of mine once defined an intellectual as someone who had lots of friends, where some of those friends were ideas. Make friends and play with the ideas of signs, and logic, and abduction. Who knows where it might take you?
The Simple Point:
Logic matters, too.
The Judgment:
Good researchers learn to master logical reasoning.
Great researchers look for any reason to reason.