Project Topic:
IMPACT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN ABDUCTION ON EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA
CHAPTER 2
2.1INTRODUCTION
2.2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.2.1 PEIRCE’S THEORY OF ABDUCTION
Although the concept of abduction was originally introduced by Aristotle, it is the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) who developed it into an explicit theory of inference. He proposed that the traditional modes of inference induction and deduction should be complemented by a third mode abduction which he claimed was qualitatively different from the two others.
Induction consists in the inference of a rule, given a specific case (a precondition) and a result (an observation). This inference involves generalization, that is, reasoning from particular instances to a general law, rule or pattern. In deduction the conclusion follows from the premises with necessity, whereas in induction it does not. We might find out that only the beans at the top of the bag were white, whereas those at the bottom were brown. Abduction is thus inferring a case from a rule and a result. Like induction this inference is also more or less probable, and not sure. The beans could in fact have come from the bag of mixed beans or from a bag that is no longer there. As we see, abduction starts with consideration of facts, that is, particular observations. These observations then give rise to a hypothesis which relates them to some other fact or rule which will account for them. This involves correlating and integrating the facts into a more general description, that is, relating them to a wider context (Givón 1989).
As can be seen, Peirce’s theory of abduction is meant to cover both practical reasoning and scientific inquiry. In fact, the philosopher seems to consider science as a just a special case of human sense-making. What makes us opt for a specific hypothesis? Here Peirce admits that it is to a great extent a matter of guessing. But for any intriguing observation there is an infinite set of possible explanations. And as we have seen, abduction is not just choosing any hypothesis, but selecting one as more plausible than the others. Peirce presents a set of criteria for choosing the best hypothesis. And here his theory is more explicitly concerned with the methodology of scientific inquiry. The first criterion is that a hypothesis should explain the surprising facts. That the hypothesis should be explanatory means that it should account for the concrete, observable phenomena by invoking facts or rules from some other domain, for instance some abstract law or nonobservable process. In this respect he opposes the positivists of his time, who claimed that science should be a mere description of observable phenomena (Fann 1970:45). The second criterion for favoring a specific hypothesis over others is economy. One should favor those hypotheses which minimize the costs in terms of testing and which maximize the effects in terms of encompassing claims. The third criterion is that the hypothesis should be capable of being subjected to experimental testing. This testing process includes deduction and induction. First, the scientist deduces that if the hypothesis is true, creating a certain set of conditions will yield certain observable results. He may then undertake a series of experiments, and if the results are favorable, extend a certain confidence to the hypothesis. This is an inductive process (Pierce 1955:152). The existence of these ”gentle forces” clearly makes it impossible to formulate predictive theories that may be experimentally tested. Rather, it seems to warrant explanations in terms of functions, principles or the like rather than causes. As we have seen, Peirce identifies the three modes of inference with three different stages in the process of scientific inquiry: Peirce notes that the process of induction involved in hypothesis testing is not a mere generalization of particulars. Rather, it involves interpretation of the results, involving estimation of their significance. This means that the process is not pure induction, but involves an element of hypothesis, that is, some element of guesswork which unites the observations. This inductive process is therefore referred to by Peirce as abductor induction (Peirce 1955:152). Any inference which involves contextual judgments of relevance and significance has an abductive element. This makes abduction an essentially pragmatic mode of reasoning (Givón 1989:242). The only mode of inference which does not make any appeal to aspects of context is deduction. This makes abduction and deduction polar opposites. Other points of contrast between these inference types are certainty and productivity. We have already seen that deduction is the only mode which guarantees the truth of the conclusion given the truth of the premises. But, unlike traditional logicians, Pierce is not just interested in the certainty of conclusions. He claims that logic should also be concerned with the informational productivity of inferences, that is, whether or not they contribute new ideas, exceeding the information which is implied by the premises. Deduction does not produce any such new ideas, whereas abduction does. This gives us the following oppositions: Deduction gives certainty for the conclusions, but is not productive and does not involve considerations of context. Abduction is a less than certain mode of inference, but is productive and relies on contextual judgments.
2.2.2 GRICE’S THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL COOPERATION
Grice’s theory of conversational cooperation has its outspring in ordinary language philosophy. It accounts for certain aspects of utterance-meaning in conversation by positing a set of principles and maxims. These are: Grice’s Cooperative Principle Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. As we see here, the maxims are motivated by human rationality and inherent goals of conversation and communication. The validity of such claims depend in the end on the meaning of concepts such as “rationality” and “communication”. And this is a matter of conceptual analysis rather than empirical investigation. This is thus a theory-driven rather than a data-driven approach. The claims about spoken interaction are based on theoretical primitives (such as meaning, rationality and communication) rather than on observation of data. It thus seems to fit nicely into Givón’s category of rationalist and deductivist theories. The puzzlement which initially motivates Grice’s search for a theory of conversation is the inadequacy of the current semantic theory to account for certain diverging uses of some connectors, such as and, if and or; and quantifiers, such as all and some (Grice 1975:41). Instead of positing two distinct meanings for these expressions, Grice proposes to posit only one word meaning and account for the other meanings as implicatures that are created by the maxims in certain contexts. Thus, the puzzling facts that trigger the process of inquiry are not the uses of the expressions themselves, but the theoretical problems they pose. The positing of a cooperative principle and a set of maxims is clearly an abductive process. It is a hypothesis which relates processes of interpretation of utterances to a wider context, namely inherent characteristics of human communication and cognition. Let us see how it agrees with Peirce’s criteria for accepting a hypothesis. First, the hypothesis is explanatory. It accounts for facts concerning actual instances of interpretation, and it does so by invoking principles from another domain. Second, it is economical. With a limited number of maxims it purports to account for a range of different discourse phenomena, such as: word/sentence meaning vs. speaker’s meaning disambiguation reference assignment indirect speech acts irony metaphor tautologies discourse coherence The third criterion is that the hypothesis should be amenable to experimental testing. Here, it is quite clear that the theory is not able to predict actual conversational behavior or specific interpretations (Sperber & Wilson 1986). However, this is even in principle an unrealistic expectation, at least if one accepts Peirce’s “law of mind” and the “gentle forces” guiding human behavior. In fact, the maxims may be seen as an attempt to formulate just those “gentle forces” or at least some of them. For instance, people will generally be guided by the quantity maxim and produce maximally informative utterances, but there might be motivations that overrule this orientation, such as the need to manage interpersonal relationships (Brown & Levinson 1987). And which circumstances may come into play on a given occasion is impossible to predict. However, the theory is to some extent capable of accounting for actual interpretations in retrospect. The problem here is that the phenomena the theory is to account for, namely speakers’ and hearers’ meaning, is itself not an observable entity. Researchers wishing to do empirical investigations may choose two different solutions. One solution may be to use a post-recording interview to ask participants what they meant or understood at various points in the conversation. This method is practiced in interactional sociolinguistics by discourse analysts such as Tannen (1984) and Schiffrin (1987). The drawbacks associated with this procedure are several:
a) First, one only gets access to the level of conscious meaning.
b) Second, the participants may not remember what they meant or understood on a given occasion.
c) Third, they may not want to tell the researcher what they actually thought.
d) Fourth, in reporting on what happened in one part of the conversation, they may be influenced by what happened subsequently and therefore not give a true picture of what they experienced at the moment.
e) Finally, the participants’ reporting’s in a post-recording interview are not “transparent” either. They are themselves in need of interpretation, and may thus require a new post recording interview (and so on in an infinite regress). Another solution to the problem of assessing actual speaker’s meanings or hearer’s interpretations in conversation may be to investigate how the participants display their intentions and interpretations in their actual contributions to the conversation. This procedure is suggested by Bilmes (1993). Here, the key to understanding the import of a contribution is to investigate how it is taken up and construed by the participants in their subsequent turns at talk. This method has the advantage of approaching more faithfully the actual treatment of a contribution by the participants. However, what is grasped is the participants’ joint construal (Clark 1996) of an utterance and not their individual intentions and interpretations. And these two things are not necessarily the same. To sum up, Grice’s theory is also an abductive approach to conversation. However, it is primarily based on predefined theories of communication and rationality and not on observation of actual data. In this sense it is more dependent on deductive modes of reasoning than on inductive ones.
A pragmatic, abductory theory of science involves functional rather than causal explanations, such that behavior is accounted for rather than predicted. This study corroborates the claim that this sort of scientific approach is crucial to the humanities and the social sciences, where the data are constituted by behavior which in itself is meaningful and context-dependent. The two approaches studied here in more detail, Conversation Analysis and Gricean pragmatics, both involve an abductory approach. However, they are yet radically different scientific enterprises. The claims of Conversation Analysis are primarily based on observations of data, whereas Grice’s claims are primarily based on general conceptions of communication and rational agency. The conversation analytic account of turn-taking is possible to falsify by reference to actual data. For instance, it would be falsified if it was shown that overlap is just as frequent or more frequent in the middle of turn constructional units than at their borders. Grice’s theory is only refutable by theoretical argument, for instance by claiming that the human mind is not rational after all or that communication is not goal oriented. And such claims are not themselves empirically testable.
2.2.3 GROUNDED THEORY (GT)
which Anselm STRAUSS refers to here in an interview decades later, is one of the most successful methods ever developed and has added a more qualitative note to social research. This is, however, not a result of the clarity and simplicity of this method established by Barney GLASER and Anselm STRAUSS but is rather due to the fact that it counteracts the common prejudice, which is to some extent entertained in science, that theories quasi emerge by themselves from the data (without any previous theoretical input). According to this belief, one only has to evoke the theory inherent in the data by means of suitable methods, the theory would then become apparent without the active actions of scientists. The theories are thus believed to emerge slowly in a process of gradual abstraction from the data. Therefore, one of the most famous quotations from The Discovery of Grounded Theory is the following: “Clearly, a grounded theory that is faithful to the everyday realities of the substantive area is one that has been carefully induced from the data” (GLASER & STRAUSS, 1967, p.239). The incorrectness of such an inductive procedure has already been proven by POPPER in general and, with respect to GT, by KELLE (1994, 2005), and by STRÜBING (2004) in particular. Many users of GT therefore regard this approach as an inductive method and are of the opinion, “that the approach signals a return to simple ‘Baconian’ inductivism” (Haig, 1995:2). Representative for many others, here is an example from Qualitative Research in Sociology: Grounded theory “is known as an inductive or ground-up approach to data analysis” (Marvasti, 2004:.84). At first the two founders of GT shared this view.
2.3 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
2.3.1 CONCEPT OF ABDUCTION
Abduction refers to criminal offence which involves kidnapping a person against his freedom and subjugates him to the threat of murder or assassination and requesting for ransom before his release. It is a criminal and traumatic behaviour orchestrated by gangster with the mindset of abducting human being for ransom. Abraham (2010) define abduction as an act of seizing, taking away and keeping a person in custody either by force or fraud. However, it includes snatching and seizing of a person in order to collect a ransom in return or settle some scores of disagreement among people. Goldberg (2000) argues that abduction is a criminal act involving seizure, confinement, abduction, subjection, forcefulness, acts of threats, acts of terror and servitude. Dode (2007) saw abduction as a process of forcefully abducting a person or group of persons perceived to be the reasons behind the injustice suffered by another group. It is “a lowcost, high-yield terror tactics”. This was the initial case in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria
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