ABDUCTIVE CREATIVITY AND ITS COMIC BREAKDOWN PEIRCE FREUD AND

ABDUCTIVE CREATIVITY AND ITS COMIC BREAKDOWN PEIRCE FREUD AND






Abductive Creativity and its Comic breakdown: Peirce, Freud, and Davidson

Abductive Creativity and its Comic breakdown: Peirce, Freud, and Davidson


Uwe Wirth, University of Frankfurt, Germany



I want to argue that there is a relation between the abductive „logic of dicovery" and the logic of the comic. Many inventions, as well as many discoveries seemed, at first, to be somehow „funny".

According to Peirce, the starting point of an inventive abduction is a surprising, and, in this sense „funny" phenomenon that needs a plausible explanation. The question, however, is: what are the criterias for plausible explanations? According to Peirce, a good explanation has to be „fruitful" as well as „economically" testable. Of course, these criterias apply also to a creative expanation. But what happens if these epistemological conditions are not fulfilled?

A similar problem as in epistemology, occurs in cases of „creative interpretation" of utterances. As Davidson has shown in „A nice derangement of epitaphs", the interpretation of creative metaphors, as well as the interpretation of „funny malapropism" is in need of „interpretive creativity". The same is true for the Freudian notion of „Comic" and „Wit".

Hence, I want to explain the Freudian notion of the comic in terms of Peircean Abduction. Furthermore I would like to interpret the effects of abduction and the effects of the comic as two interdedependent steps in the process of semi-osis in regard to the "Principle of Economy"; a principle which underlies both, comic and abduction.







Tags: abductive creativity, the abductive, freud, creativity, breakdown, comic, peirce, abductive