oatley-inference.rtf

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In Modes of Thought, Edited by D. Olson & N. Torrance (pp. 123- 140) New York:Cambridge University Press .

Inference i n Narrative an d Science

Keith OatleyCentre for Applied Cognitive Science, Ontario Institute for Studies i n Education

and Department of Psychology, University of Toronto

Introduction: Narrative thinkingHappy families ar e all alike; every unhappy family is un happy in its own way. So

wrote To lstoy (1877) in the famous op ening sentence of Anna Karenina . We are promptedto think: are we going to read about a happy family? No if the au thor has w ritten asentence with a rst part about happy families and a second part about every unhappyfamily this story must be ab out a family that is u nhappy in a d istinctive way. So: withthis sentence Tolstoy prompts our minds into motion. Further thoughts may occur:perhaps there is a bri ef frisson of emotion, or a ash o f memory. Will this unhappyfamily be unlike mine?

Another famous rst sentence is by I.A. Richards (1925): A book is a m achine to think

with what kind of thinking do books enable us t o do? In particular, what do booksof ction enable u s to do as compared with books of science? Bruners (1986) proposalthat there ar e two modes of thought, a n arrative m ode for t hinking about human actionand a paradigmatic mode for thinking about mechanisms and natural science is aproductive o ne (in his chapter in this vo lume Bruner calls them agentive a nd epistemic).Here I suggest that the n arrative m ode is u seful in many domains, not just in ction. I tis b ased on distinctive psychological processes, and it i s u sed widely in explanation,including scientic ex planation.

One of the p roperties of t he n arrative mode is that objects exp ressed in this m ode that is to say stories ab out agents slip easily into the mind. The story of AnnaKarenina is an ex ample. T he m ind is more r esistant to objects based on the p aradigmaticmode. A t least such objects need elaborate cu ltural assistance t o a llow them to enter themind, for example knowledge about how to reason mathematically, or how tounderstand statistical data p resented in tables or d iagrams, or ho w to draw inferencesvalidly from scientic ex periments.


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Scientists d o not restrict themselves t o mathematics, diagrams, and experiments. T heyuse narrative too. H ere ar e a f ew sentences from Richard Feynmans famous textbook of

physics (1963). T hey a re from his introduction to Newtons t hird law of motion which i sthat: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Feynman introduceshis d iscussion in narrative m ode, with a st ory about two agents called particles:

Suppose w e h ave t wo small bodies, say particles, and suppose t hat the rst oneexerts a force on the second one, pushing it with a certain force. Then,simultaneously, according to Newtons Third Law, the secon d particle w ill pushon the rst with an equal force, in the o pposite d irection . . . (p. 10-2)

A little further dow n the p age, Feynman switches to the p aradigmatic mode, with an

equation for these equ al and opposite forces:dp 1/dt = - dp 2/dt.

In this equation, the m omentum of Particle 1 i s p 1 and the momentum of Particle 2 i s p 2,force is the rate of change of momentum (dp/dt), and the eq uation expresses the ideathat these t wo forces are eq ual and opposite, but the eq uation or i ndeed the r eason whyone might w ish to write it ar e incomprehensible without kn owledge of calculus, aWestern cultural product. What Feynman is doing, of course, is to begin hisexplanations in narrative m ode in order to connect with our ordinary human intuitions,

which will then be formalized by means of the cognitive prostheses of d ifferentialequations, from which a w hole set of new inferences can be made that are unavailableto people who ar e nai ve in mathematics.

Let us now take an example from ction: Sh erlock Holmes has just examined two earssent in a card board box to a lady in Croydon. Lestrade, the inspector of police, thinksthat the ear s must have been sent as a p ractical joke by some medical students. H olmesspeaks rst, then Lestrade:

. . . this i s n ot a practical joke.

You are su re o f it?The presumption is strongly against it. Bodies in the dissecting rooms areinjected with preservative uid. These ear s bea r no sign of this. T hey are f resh,too. T hey have been cut off with a blunt instrument, which would hardly happenif a st udent had done i t . . . We a re i nvestigating a seri ous cr ime (Doyle, 1981, p.892).


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Soon after t his sp eech Holmes n otices t hat the ears of t he recipient of t he gruesomepackage h ave si milar c onformations t o those of one o f the ears in the b ox, and infers t hatthis ear b elonged to a cl ose r elative or h ers. He ex plains t o Watson that he n oticed this

ear's ch aracteristics b ecause h ad studied ears, and written two articles i n the previousyears Anthropological Journal o n their i diosyncratic sh apes.

Having given examples from science and from ction, let me ad d one further example:from autobiography. In 1907 the founder of American pragmatism and semiotics, C.S.Peirce wrote an article for t he Atlantic Monthly in which he recounted the followingincident. The article was rejected, but an account of the incident, publishedposthumously, was reproduced in an article by S ebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1983) whichhas se rved as inspiration for m y chapter, also both a source and a key for som e of

Peirces w ritings. (They use P eirce, 1935-1966, as t heir s ource, for qu otations f rom Peircehere, I give t he p age n umbers i n their art icle.)

In 1879 Peirce had sailed in a steam ship from Boston to New York to attend aconference. A fter disembarking he d iscovered he had left behind a va luable watch t hathad been been given him by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, as w ell as hi s over coat.He went immediately back to the ship to nd his things gone. H e ar ranged to have allthe sh ip's w aiters l ined up before h im:

I went from one en d of the row to the other, and talked a l ittle to each one, in as

dgag a m anner as I could, about whatever he cou ld talk about with interest, butwould least expect me to bring forward, hoping that I might seem such a foolthat I should be ab le to detect some sl ight symptom of his bei ng the thief. W henI had gone through the row I turned and walked from them, though not away,and said to myself, Not t he least scintilla of light have I got t o go upon. Butthereupon my other self (for ou r communings ar e always in dialogues) said tome, But you simply must put your nger on the man. N o matter if you have noreason, you must say w hom you will think to be the thief. I made a l ittle loop inmy walk, which h ad not taken a m inute, and as I turned toward them, all shadowof a doubt had vanished (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983 p. 11-12).

Peirce took one m an aside, but could not persuade h im by reason, threat, or t he offer of$50, to give up the lost objects. He h ad the m an followed . . . After a com plex p ursuit,Peirce regained his possessions. The man he picked out had indeed stolen t hem.


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In The Adventure of the Cardboard box shortly after inferring that the parcelcontaining the two ears could only be exp lained by a crime, Sherlock Holmes gave o neof the b est denitions o f this k ind of inference t hat Peirce h ad made t o identify the t hief:

to reason backward from effects to causes (Doyle, 1981, p. 895). Though Holmesclaimed that h is inferences w ere as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid(Doyle, 1981, p. 23, Study in Scarlet ), Peirce was more candid: such an inference isalways a g uess, a singular s alad . . . whose ch ief elements are i ts g roundlessness, itsubiquity, and its trustworthiness (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983, p. 16). Peirce sawthe a bility to make su ch inferences, which he cal led abductions, as p art of our gi venmental equipment: the human mind having been d eveloped under the inuence of thelaws of nature, for that r eason naturally thinks somewhat af ter n atures pattern(Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983, p. 17). Abductive guesses ar e not always cor rect, but

they a re corr ect far m ore frequently that would occur by chance.

In 1878 Peirce h ad proposed that there a re only three f orms of i nference. Abduction isone of these. H e exp ressed the idea i n terms of syllogistic gures abo ut drawing beansfrom a b ag, like t his ( Sebeok, 1983, p. 8).

DeductionRule: All the beans from this bag are whiteCase: These beans are from this bag

Result: These beans are white

InductionCase: These beans are from this bagResult: These beans are whiteRule: All the beans from this bag are white

AbductionRule: All the beans from this bag are whiteResult: These beans are whiteCase: These beans are from this bag

Deduction is i nference i n which we reason from a rule, generalization, or t heory, tosome particular i nstance, or case as P eirce calls i t. Johnson-Laird (1993) has w rittenthat in deduction there is no gain of semantic information. When we reason in theopposite direction there is a gain of semantic information. One form of se mantically


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Human life, as m any social scientists h ave observed, is founded on being able to actpurposefully in the world, using information in planning processes to work out how toact. In understanding a st ory, we run these planning processes, as i t were, backwards:

nding explanations i n terms an agents go als an d plans for t he act ions an d events t hatwe read about. A s Wilensky (1978) has put it, when w e read a story w e ar e not trying towork out what will happen next. Rather, we summon up a range of explanations forwhat does ha ppen. T he g enre o f the d etective st ory, or mystery, involves u s in focussingspecically on explanations of the act ions of one ch aracter the m urderer.

The effect of prompting explanations of action is n ot conned to narratives o f detection.It i s ch aracteristic of al l narrative, from the recounting of on es own actions a s P eircedid, to the h ighest art. In Anna Karenina , for i nstance, Anna and Vronsky fall in love

near the beg inning of the novel. Why? Tolstoy goes t o considerable lengths to providethe reader with the background information that they had both led divided lives. Heshows us V ronsky going to the s tation to meet his m other, not because h e w anted to, but

because he would always act in obedience notice Anna get ting off the train, because he is not fully en gaged in what he is doing. A sto Anna, she acts respectably although married to someone whom she does not l ove.When Anna and Vronsky fall in love, then, this d oes n ot come exactly as a surprise.Rather i t grows o ut of their ch aracters, goals, and life si tuation. Without being able t omake t he i nferences ab out the roo ts o f their act ions i n their charact ers an d life si tuations

we would probably not enjoy the novel. As Henry James (1884) asked: What ischaracter b ut t he determination of incident? What i s incident bu t t he illustration ofcharacter? In the n ineteenth-century novel, then, what we ab duce in explaining actionis ch aract er. By contrast in scientic ex position, narrative typically gives w ay to otherforms of discourse, and to inferences about how things work.

What individual human m inds cant doSuppose that W ilensky (1978) is right in proposing that a basic process of r eadingnarrative is summoning up explanations that is to say m aking abductive inferences about what is going on. This may happen either because, in a detective story, theprotagonist with whom we identify makes i nferences that will later be corr oborated byevents, or m ore su btly because ch aracters actions al low us t o infer ch aracter, as i n thenovels of Tolstoy and Henry James.

Perhaps, indeed, abduction is a ki nd of inference t hat is ch aract eristic of ction. R eadersare easi ly led into abductive inferences. P erhaps a d istinctive at tribute o f ction what


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makes i t ction rather t han science is that t he inferences sel dom stand realisticscrutiny, let alone scientic scrutiny. Abduction is nowadays d ened as reasoningtowards the best explanation. I n a st ory, because t he w riter constructs a cl osed world he

or sh e can make sure an inference is indeed the best explanation. But in real life,looking forward from any event into the future we usually do not knowwhichexplanation will be the best one: a guess m ay be better than a random shot as Pei rceargued, but it will be a g uess. P erhaps abduction is only for ction, and other domainsthat need no rm anchor in fact. P erhaps climbing through a web of abductions allowsus merely to escap e into fanciful but non-existent universes. Perhaps science d ependson different forms of inferencing. P erhaps it depends as Bacon proposed, on inductionsfrom sets of cognate instances to generalizations and laws. P erhaps, when informationis t o be increased scientically, induction is t he heart of t he paradigmatic (epistemic)

mode of thought.

Brown and Clement (1987) have shown, however, that induction to a scienticgeneralization is very difficult. Their subjects were high-school students who mightsubsequently take physics, but had not yet done so. There was a p retest with threequestions abou t Newtons third law (the on e mentioned above in discussing Feynmanstextbook). One qu estion was abou t a book on a table: does t he table exer t an upwardsforce o n the b ook? In a p ost-test, after instruction on Newtons t hird law, the sam e t hreequestions were asked again, together with two more. F rom 14 students who could not

correctly answer the question about the book on the table in the pretest, theexperimenters randomly selected two g roups of seven students each.

One group was instructed using the best available high-school physics textbook. I t wasan innovative a nd well written book. T he section used for instruction on Newtons thirdlaw was an exposition that dealt explicitly with whether a t able on which a book isresting exerts an upwards force o n the book. It started straight out by saying that thetable d oes exer t a force on the book. Then came a set of other examples of action andreaction, including a nger p ressing on a st one (Newtons ow n example), a ri e k ick, anathlete running. Then the text returned to the exam ple of the book on the table. Themessage to this group of students was t hat they should, under gu idance of t he text,make an inductive i nference f rom a set of examples t o Newtons t hird law.

The second group of students was not encouraged to do induction. Instead they wereoffered a bridging concept t hat offered an explanation of why Newtons third lawworked a concept that would allow them to do abduction. H ere is the concept they


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were offered: rst think of pushing down with your hand on a spring resting on a table;notice how the spring would push back on your hand. Then think of a book resting on along springy plank that has been l aid across a gap between t wo saw horses. I magine the

planks springiness pu shing back on the bo ok. Next imagine t he p lank becoming thickerand thicker. The springiness of the plank has not gone away, but as the plank getsthicker i t need s m ore force to let u s see it ben ding. The thicker p lanks sp ringiness i sstiffer. All materials h ave sp ringiness, dependent on the b onds b etween the m olecules,so that even when no deformation of a plank or an y other m aterial is visible, thisspringiness i s s till there. So it is i n a t able; its sp ringiness p ushes b ack on a b ook restingon it.

So: the students in the sec ond group were offered an explanation that could enter their

minds. It was t he m issing half, as i t were, of the ab duction: observation the b ook restson the table, explanation its d ownward force is exactly opposed by an equivalentforce of the sp ringiness of the t able. In the p ost-test, seven out of seven of the st udentswho were given the exp lanation about the sp ringiness of materials an swered correctlythe question about the book on the table, signicantly more t han the two out of sevenstudents from the induction group. The ab duction group also gave corr ect answers forthe other exa mples i n the post test, and in this al so did signicantly better t han theinduction group.

There i s a g rowing number of indications t hat induction to productive generalizations i sdifficult for humans. Brown & Clements study is one s uch. Others are shown fromCases (1991) extensive st udies of how children who have ski lls in one d omain, thoughthey involve com parable procedures to problems in adjoining domains, do not transferthese ski lls. They do not on their ow n make t he g eneralizing induction, though they can

be instructed to acqui

In an early and important paper on articial intelligence N ewell (1972) made a relatedpoint about psychology, which had tied itself to an inductive model of s cience. N ewellargued that in psychology one can not hop e to perform a set of experiments, eachyielding one small piece o f empirically established knowledge, and then by inductionfrom these o bservations arr ive a t general principles o f mental functioning.

Simulation Newell was in the forefront of introducing into the study of mind the methodology ofdesign. We do not have to rely solely on experiments; we can a lso see w hat principles


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are involved by trying to design mental-like processes. The cognitive designmethodology can be thought of as simulation. Notice how the term simulationcarries a distrustful connotation of falsehood, just as d oes t he term ction. Despite

this it has b een the computational exploration of the d esign of mental-like processesthat ha s formed the intellectual centre of the cognitive revolution in psychology. Theidea i s t hat if one real ly understands s omething one can write a program to simulate i t,and that if one does not understand it then computational explorations will beprofoundly important in understanding underlying principles an d in providing newmetaphors.

Simulation need neither start nor stop with computers. In Best Lai d Schemes (1992) Imade the case that nov els in the narrative mode are not d escriptions of action, but

simulations of action that run on the m inds of readers. T he idea d erives, I hope w ithoutanachronism, from the Poetics , in which Aristotle discusses ho w drama is mimesis ofhuman action. Mimesis is usually translated into English as imitation orrepresentation. But, I suggest, what Aristotle r eally meant was cl oser to what we n owmean by simulation. A play is a s imulation of action by the actors. But there is anextra st ep beyond this, and beyond the i dea o f simulation on computers: the st ep is t hata play as i t is p erformed, or a n arrative a s i t is r ead, only really becomes a simulation inthe sense that Aristotle m eant when it runs on the m inds of an audience or readers. I s itthe music or the ways in which the actors are dressed that make a pl ay moving? No,

says A ristotle, they are t he l east important elements. I t is t he p lot which is . . . the h eartand soul, as it were, of tragedy . . . it is t he mimesis of an action and [simulates] personsprimarily for the sake o f their action (p. 28). So simulations m ust concentrate on whatis essen tial, and in the ca se o f narrative t his includes act ion. The a ction of the p lay istaken up into our own cognitive planning mechanisms. We sit in the theatre and runthese actions as if they were our own. Comparable processes occur, I believe, inwatching sports. Rather than being used to decide what to do the way theseprocesses ar e m ostly used in real life these p lanning processes ar e g uided by the p lotas w e identify with a p rotagonist in a st ory, or by the ow of action as w e identify withan athlete i n a sp orting event.

Just as cognitive sfrom this a rgument t hat i t should be equally appropriate for a cognitive scientist t owrite simulations (novels) to run on minds. Cognitive scientists who write programssee a bduction as cen tral to their activities. It occurred to me t hat this cou ld be a ce ntralissue i n a novel. The Case of Emily V. (Oatley, 1993) is such a n ovel about the nature of


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truth and the search for it. I n it both Sherlock H olmes and Sigmund Freud (unbeknownto each other at rst) investigate the sam e person. The question is how might ideasabout abduction resolve the tension between empirical (Holmesian) and hermeneutic

(Freudian) thinking. In this n ovel, it is n ot just a matter of r eading about such issues asin an academic art icle, the reader nds h im- or h er-self making such inferences, andthereby being able to experience something of the possibilities o f d iscovering truthwithin each kind of thinking.

Emotions during readingOne o f the features o f reading narrative, as A ristotle p ointed out, is t hat we ourselvesare affected by emotions as t he p lans an d actions of a p rotagonist meet vicissitudes.Although the act ion is simulated, the em otions that occur w hen we run the act ions of

the drama on our planning systems are real. They ar e ou r own emotions. Aristotle inPoetics d iscussed the signicance o f experiencing emotions su ch as f ear an d pity intragedies, and of u ndergoing the p rocess of katharsis , which may best be translated asclarication. I have d iscussed this more extensively elsewhere ( Oatley, 1992).

As one reads, or as on e watches a p erformance in the theatre, emotions occur. Theoccurrence o f such emotions, I take i t, is ev idence t hat a read er i s p ersonally connectedto the story one seldom hears abo ut people exp eriencing emotions (except perhapsanxiety and exasperation) when reading scientic textbooks. When we identify with

agents in a story, when we run their actions on our own planning processes, theemotions p roduced as t he protagonists act ions m eet with events in the story worldhappen to us, the readers or members of the audience. T hey do not merely happen tothe ch aracters in the st ory. (An alternative t heory of the em otions of narrative, due toTan, 1994, is t hat in the st ory world we a re i nvisible o bservers. Emotions w e ex perienceare t hose of human sympathy. I have d iscussed this al ternative theory and its relationto my theory of understanding narrative as a f orm of simulation in Oatley, 1994).

According to Peirce an emotion is itself is a kind of abduction. This formulation consistent w ith the theory of emotions that Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987) havepropsed enables u s to see h ow the re ader, not just the story character, makes su chabductions. The argu ment is t hat during evolution certain recurring kinds of events w illhave o ccurred. By natural selection, organisms h ave ev olved to recognize such events,and to deal with them. As Peirce put it, without such abductions, the human racewould long ago have been extirpated for its utter i ncapacity in the struggles forexistence ( Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983, p. 17). Thus fear i s a k ind of inference t hat


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occurs in response t o events o f certain kinds. It is an explanation, as i t were, that theseevents are d angerous, and pragmatically it prompts a distinctive repertoire of action: tointerrupt the current behavior, to seek safety, to ght. During evolution such

mechanisms of recognition and repertoires of appropriate response have b een compiledinto the nervous systems of animals including ourselves. When reading a thriller, forinstance, exactly this k ind of abduction occurs to us, and we read quickly to reach thepoint when the p rotagonist is aga in safe.

What kind of emotions occur during reading? Oatley and Biason (forthcoming) had 59high-school students r ead a sh ort story ab out identity. There w ere t wo such stories, eachin the rst person, each with an adolescent narrator. O ne by Alice M unro is called RedDress: it is ab out a girl who goes t o a shool da nce, fearing she looks d readful in the

dress her mother has m ade for her , and fearing that she w ill be a w allower. T he ot her, by Carson McCullers, called Sucker,

him like a younger br other. The protagonist who has largely ignored the younger boy,starts t o treat hi m better w hen a girl to whom he is at tracted starts rec iprocating hisattention. We randomly assigned students to one o f the two stories, asked them to readit as t hey would ordinarily and, adapting the m ethod of Larson (1988), we asked thatthey mark an E in the margin at any point where they experienced an emotion, and tomark an M where a p ersonal memory came to mind. After reading their story, theygave some details about the emotions and memories they had marked. We related

measures d erived from these incidents of emotion and memory to other variables, suchas l iking for the story and amount of out-of-school reading. W e al so asked two teachersof English Literature at their s chool to discuss between themselves cr iteria they used formarking, and then to mark the students summaries of the stories. I will present oneobservation and two sets of data from the study.

The observation is this: all the st udents had both emotions an d memories d uring theirreading of the st ory. All, therefore, connected themselves to the text in a p ersonal way not just analysing it without involvement of the self. O bviously we cr eated a d emandcharacteristic: we asked the st udents t o have em otions an d memories, but none o f themhad any problem with this task.

The data were as follows. W e counted how many emotions each student recorded, andin Table 1 the res ult is shown: the d ata a re p resented as a f unction of the gender of thereader and the story that was read. If we take the number of these emotions as ameasure of identication with the protagonist, the girls were signicantly more


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involved than the b oys, and were eq ually able t o identify with either a f emale o r a m aleprotagonist. To those v ersed in the p sychology of gender differences this r esult may beunsurprising. What we con cluded was t hat the ab ility to identify with (or p erhaps hav e

sympathy for) a character in a story can be measured. (G. Cupchik, P. Vorderer, and Ihave su bsequently run, but not yet analysed, a st udy of reading in which we d istinguishthe hy pothesis of identication from Tans, 1994, hypothesis of sympathy.) Secondly wefound that these m easures of involvement with the story, though they were ass ociatedwith the extent t o which the students l iked the story, were not as sociated with theiracademic ach ievements: their expected marks in English l iterature o r the m arks gi ven tothem anonymously by two teachers for their summaries. The somewhat dispiritingconclusion is t hat although literature i n both school and university is t hought to be t hesubject in which there can be involvement of s elf in the domain of p ersonal values,

students abilities t o do what is r equired of them by the cu rriculum (e.g. giving detailsof the story and understanding its theme the cr iteria on which the teachers m arkedthe su mmaries) were independent of the s tudents personal involvement in the st ory.

Table 1. Mean n umbers of emotions reported by male and female high-school students(numbers of students are in parentheses) reading a story w ith a m ale p rotagonist(Sucker) and a female p rotagonist (Red Dress)

Story

SuckerRed Dress Combining both stories Numbers of emotions

Eor males 4.88 (n=17)2.88 (n=17) 3.88* (n=34)

For females 6.77 (n=13)6.67 (n=12) 6.72* (n=25)

* main effect of gender were si gnicantly different in analysis of variance at p < 0.02

There is n ow a substantial amount of r esearch to indicate that whenever each distinctkind of basic em otion (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) is arou sed, it produces adistinctive kind of cognitive p rocess. Thus Isen (1990) has sho wn that when they arehappy people ar e m ore gener ous to others, they m ake more c reative word associations,they m ore easi ly solve cer tain kinds of problems, etc. W hen they a re sad or depressedpeople tend to have p revious sad episodes from their lives coming to mind (Williams,


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Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1988). When they are fearful attention is stronglyconstrained towards issues of safety and danger ( Mathews, 1993). W hen they are ang rycertain kinds of plans beg in to be formed, to get even. My colleagues and I are now

investigating how each emotion mode aroused by reading, then operates in theinterpretation of the t ext. I predict the sam e d istinctive eff ects of emotions w ill be found.What I propose from the preliminary data of Table 1 is that specic emotions aretypically produced while reading narrative and that, as elsewhere, each kind ofemotional state gives rise to a distinctive mode of thought with identiablecharact eristics. By contrast when reading science, even in narrative p assages, there i s n otthe sam e d egree o f identication, hence n ot the sam e o pportunity for em otions t o occur.And, as m any would claim, scientically we m ight try to avoid entering into emotionalmodes, though I have s ome m ore t o say ab out this later.

Abduction and its r elation to other forms of inferenceAlthough abduction is gu essing this form of thought occurs in science too. As Pei rceput it: not the smallest advance can be m ade in knowledge beyond the stage o f vacantstaring, without making an abduction at every step (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983, p.16). So how does ction differ f rom science? One way, I believe, is that ction, likeother kinds of simulation, is concerned mainly with coherence. Though ction hasmultiple meanings for d ifferent people, each ensemble of meanings must cohere w ithinitself. More interestingly too, for each narrative that is read the m eaning must cohere

with the r eaders bel iefs an d emotional responses: this is a st ep towards w hat we m ean by personal truth, the believe, is part

narrative. By contrast science h as o ther p rocedures f rom which the p ersonal is, in a sense, factoredout and by which con sensual truths m ay b e t ransmitted. I t involves a m ore el aborate setof inferences. Peirce p roposed that doing scientic research n eeds t o use h is t hree k indsof reasoning in a specied order. First one uses ab duction from observations to apossible exp lanation or hypothesis. From this one deduces a fact, not yet observed.Then a seri es of tests of such facts ar e p ut together w ith the o riginal observation to makea gen eralizing induction (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok, 1983, pp. 49-50, Note 9).

Peirce said that before t he turn of the cent ury he more or less m ixed up abduction andinduction: then he made the distinction clearly in a number of m etaphors. Here(somewhat modied from Peirces complex formulation) is one of these. Suppose you


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have t wo p ieces of paper: on one is a t yped letter, the o ther bears a si gnature. S uppose i tis important to know if the signature belongs to the typed letter. If there areirregularities i n a pattern of t earing, such that t he typed piece o f p aper an d the piece

with the signature exact ly m atch, you could make an abduction: t he signature bel ongedto the typed letter and was t orn from it. I f, however, we w ish t o co nrm this, we need tomake inductions: the two pieces of paper which matched in such irregularities as have

been examined would be found to match in Umiker-Sebeok, 1983 p. 25). Peirce con tinues in this passage: The inference from theshape of the paper t o its ownership is p recisely what d istinguishes hypothesis f rominduction, and makes i t a b older and more p erilous s tep.

Individual and distributed modes of thought

Most researchers c onceptualize thought as a process of the individual mind. There isanother p ossibility: as Vygotsky (1930) and Harr (1983) hav e su ggested, thought mayrst of all be so cial; later i n development we can do it individually, while m aintaining itssocial quality in inner d iaogue as P eirce m entioned in his an ecdote about di scoveringwho had stolen his watch and overcoat. This idea i s ap pealing because i t makes i t easyto see h ow the soci al, for example in the form of culturally elaborated methods of usinginferences, enter i nto thinking.

Individual and social thinking in narrative. In genres su ch as t he detective st ory, the

author h as t hought individually to create a closed world with a p rotagonist. Readersrun the p rotagonists act ion on their ow n minds an d think the p rotagonists t houghts. Inthis case read ing too is i ndividual: readers en gage in what Barthes ( 1975) ha s cal led areaderly reading, becoming somewhat passive receivers of the au thors t ext.

Barthes (1975) has argued that w ith the polysemous nature of literary narrative,particularly in texts t hat are co nsidered good literature, because o f the d ifferent levels o fmeaning that are involved, readers can also en gage in writerly read ings. Readers d onot just receive the t ext, they transform it, becoming writers of the u nderstandings t hatthey create. Writerly readings are constructive of a constrained but op en set ofmeanings to be d iscovered by the reader interacting w ith the text. W henever a writerlyreading occurs, the read er i s act ive, and we can say that the t hought associated with the

book is no longer just and reader, has occu rred. Cognition is d istributed between writer and reader.


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Individual and social thinking in scientic inference. Not only is induction hard forindividuals to do productively, as I have suggested above, but even if more-or-lessforced to do it, they still nd it hard to make generalizations con verging on truth in

ways t hat are ch aracter istic o f science.

Here is a st udy to this p oint by Wason (1960) on university student subjects w ho wereasked to con sider the three d igits 2, 4, 6 an d nd what general rule he had in mindthat connected the digits. Each was asked to write down new examples of strings ofdigits, noting also why each example was offered. Wason then said whether eachexample obeyed his general rule or not . Subjects were to go on proposing examplesuntil they thought they knew what the general rule was. Then they had to write thisgeneralization down, and Wason told them if it was what he had in mind.

Most subjects an nounced at least one incorrect general rule before nding the correctone and 28% failed to discover the rule at al l. They proceeded mainly by offeringexamples t hat could conrm their current hypothesis. If they thought that the r ule w asthree succe ssive even numbers in ascending order they might offer 6, 8, 10, then22, 24, 26, and so on. After ded ucing several such examples they would announcetheir hy pothesis as t he general rule. Much less frequently did they offer e xamples t hatmight disconrm the hypothesis they were entertaining su ch as 1, 3, 7.

The rule that the exp erimenter had in mind was t his: any three n umbers in ascendingorder. To discover it, subjects h ad both to vary their hypotheses and generate exa mplescontrary to them. In this way one su bject offered 10, 6, 4 giving as h er hypothesis:The highest number must go last. After entertaining several hypotheses, andgenerating nine examples, one (just given) negative to the hypothesis she wasentertaining, she announced the rule correctly in 17 minutes. The tendency toperseverate on positive instances ha s been called the co nrmation bias: people sel domfollow the procedure that Po pper ( 1962) re gards as basic to science, of gen eratinginstances that m ight d isconrm hypotheses. In Peirces terms they were workinginductively, but were u sing induction upon unhelpful examples.

The issue is this. When we think of modes of thought as individual, experiments suchas Brown and Clements or W asons, showing that people nd induction to scienticgeneralizations very hard, seem discourgaging. What is required I believe are threesteps, all of potential signicance f or educators in understanding thinking.


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The rst step is t o recognize and understand the processes o f inference. As Peirce h asproposed, there a re o nly three f orms: abduction, deduction, induction.

The second step is to inquire w hether t here are n atural barriers in humans to any ofthese three forms o f inference. I d o not b elieve there are. I hav e already argued thatabduction is a f undamental mode of human thinking, as i ndicated by its ease, and by itsuse i n the u niversal human activity of u nderstanding stories. I suggest deduction too isuniversal. Here is an example from Homer. A t the begi nning of the Iliad the Greek armyis beset by a pestilence (observation). It i s explained (abduction) i n terms of A pollo

being angry with them (theory). Frm tthat t hey should do something to placate Apollo. This d eduction is o f a k ind easilymade, by anyone h earing this s tory, or a si milar ep isode from another c ulture; theories

that i llness i s d ue to personal agency occur i n many cultures ( Foster, 1976), includingour ow n for i nstance Koslowski et al. [, 1978 #176] found that 40% of patients whohad a heart attack thought it was due to the will of God, and 20% thought it waspunishment for their ow n misdeeds. All theories o f heal th, including folk theories,allow deductions t o be drawn: these t ake the form of predictions and recommendations.As to induction, there is n o reason to believe that it is beyond any ordinary human

being. It would be eccentric induce o n the basis of previous d ays t hat the su n will rise t omorrow, or that like o therpeople ea ch of us w ill die.

The third step: what does Western culture offer by way of scientic thinking and theparadigmatic (or epistemic) mode of thought? My p roposal is that like w riterly read ing,science depends on two things: the availablity of w riting, as Olson (1994) has soelegantly shown, and the use of Peirces three forms of thinking in carefullyorchestrated, socially distributed, ways. So, in science, to paraphrase N ewton, in orderto see far w e m ust stand on the sho ulders of giants. We r ead the w ritings o f those w hohave g one b efore, acquire i ntellectual prostheses f rom the t radition of scientic r esearch.And, if we are p roducers of science w e t hink not individually but socially. Shortcomingsof i ndividual i nference-making are overcome by distributed cognition (Oatley, 1991):one p erson proposes a h ypothesis, another w ho has a different i nterest in the m atterproposes inductive tests that could disconrm it. Though we humans are not good atgenerating examples t o disconrm our ow n theories, because t heories ar e t he sp ectaclesthrough which we see the world, we are good at seeing what is wrong with otherpeoples ideas. Here emotion and its modes of t hinking enter science. People can


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behave aggressively to defeat a Convergence on truth is a f ortunate by -product.

The distributed process of science has been recently studied by Dunbar (1993), acognitive psychologist who spent a year l earning molecular b iology and cell biology,and then a year as an observer i n four major U S cell and molecular bi ology laboratoriesthat work on mechanisms of cancer, AIDS, etc. Dunbar found that much of theconceptual change t hat occurs i n the laboratories h e st udied is t raceable t o the m eetingsof seven to thirty people that are hel d weekly or so. In these m eetings post-doctoralfellows and graduate st udents p resent what they have b een working on, and the r esultsare d iscussed within the g roup. O ne o f the p rocesses t hat leads t o conceptual change iswhat Dunbar calls regional analogy. Such analogies are made within a region of

understanding, but from some other part of the region. W hen there is some result thatis d ifficult to understand analogies t o what is kn own in another biochemical system, orfrom some other sub-eld, or from some other organism are suggested by members ofthe research m eeting. T he problem and data can then b e reconceptualized.

In three o f the four laboratories t hat Dunbar st udied the members al l have different backgrounds and training: in biochemistry, molecular biology, c

developmental biology, and so o n. Collectively they are w ell placed to see r esults fromdifferent v iewpoints. These three laboratories generate and make frequent u se of

regional analogies new insights occur, and new discoveries are made. In the fourthlaboratory all the m embers have s imilar backgrounds. T hough the group is respected, ithas m ade l ess progress recently; its w ork occurs l argely by varying parameters.

Secondly, Dunbar found that conrmation bias is counteracted by one personpresenting results, and others at t he meetings seei ng different interpretations o f them.One example, described by Dunbar in colloquia he is now giving, occurred when ascientist presented to a laboratory meeting some of his r ecent results t hat h e said hecould not understand in terms of the exp lanation he offered. A nother scientist, quickly

joined by some others, proposed says t his new explanation has becom e the basis of a very important scientic ad vance.But it took the person who had done the experiments two weeks before he u nderstoodit, let al one a ccepted it.

Science w ould not work with individual knowers an d doers. Its cognition is necess arilydistributed. Each participant ha s a role in the process o f ap proaching truth. No-one


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embodies, let alone reaches, the t ruth as a whole. In the h istory of science t here a resome apparent counter examples of people who worked largely individually. Aninstructive one w as D arwin in his d iscovery of evolution by means of natural selection.

Although Darwins observations from his voyage on the Beagle may seem to have beenindividual and atheoretical gathering of exam ples, this was n ot t heir p rovenance. Asshown by Gruber (1974, see especi ally his d iagrams on p. 127), Darwins ob servationswere collected to test a theory. At rst the theory was t hat the physical world hadchanged but species are xed and adapted to it. T hen as he b egan to believe t hat speciesalso changed he reconsidered his ob servations to test his n ew idea. He formulated histheory of evolution by natural selection in 1838. So the question for bi ographers an d

biologists is: what as i On the Origin

of S pecies in 1859? The answer is that Darwin more than most scientists was notinterested in merely publishing an abduction, a hypothesis. He saw the p roblem as arhetorical one, in Aristotles non-pejorative sense of this term. He wanted to haveevidence for h is hypothesis t hat w ould come as cl ose to the irrefutable as p ossible.What Darwin did was what Peirce later recommended. He cycled round the loop:abduction, deduction, induction. He was abl e to maintain within himself the socialelement: he had both his own new hypothesis of nat ural selection, and he held onclearly to the cou nter-hypothesis f rom which the at tacks o n his t heory would come, thathumans and all other species had been separately created and had remained xed.

What Darwin did, and what he wrote about in the Origin of Species and in his later books on evolution, derived fpaand from the counter hypothesis. W hen his books were p ublished, and the actual socialprocess of criticism began, the sc ales w ere so h eavily weighted in Darwins f avour by hishaving thought through the arguments and generated extra examples over w hich tomake i nductive generalizations, that the o utcome w as ass ured, at least among scientists.

Nowadays, science con forms cl osely to its exp licitly social format. T o publish reputably,for instance, one person takes the role of au thor, others review each submittedmanuscript and take t he r ole o f seeing it from the p oint of vi ew of d ifferent hypotheses,abducing to different exp lanations than the one the author is proposing. Differentpeople a ct in different phases of Peirces cycl e, so t ruths based on the co rrespondence

between hypotheses and empirical re

The success of our hu man adaptation is that humans, more than any other vertebratespecies, can join together t o do things t hat are t oo difficult to do alone. A great deal of


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thinking is of this kind. I t includes thinking the thoughts prompted by reading a n ovelin a w riterly way, and it includes sc ientic t hinking. It is n ot so m uch that certain kindsof thinking are d ifficult in themselves. Rather, some o f the overall patterns of t hinking

are too difficult for i ndividuals: therefore we d o them together, each of us taking on,from time t o time, a d ifferent role i n larger, distributed, inferen tial processes.

AcknowledgementThanks to David Olson and Tom Trabasso for t heir hel pful comments on a d raft of thispaper, and to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of C anada forsupporting the r esearch under grant number 410- 93-1445.


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