Participant: Ramsey Affifi
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

According to Peirce, life comes to know through different types of inferential (though not necessarily propositional) processes, including abduction, induction, and deduction. Although these terms describe ways an organism can be said to construct knowledge, they cannot describe what is inferentially unique about how multiple organisms come to know through interacting together. In such cases, neither what is becoming known, nor the living beings coming to know, remain constant, and conventionally recognized inferential processes become parts of recursively dynamic, meta-inferential relational contexts. Thus, learning that goes on in intersubjective interactions forms and is formed by, but is different in kind from abstracted, context-neutral, non-interactive, inferential types.

The relationship between two living beings is made possible by the capacity of each to learn from the other, each becoming something new by what the other becomes, with each bringing forth latent possibilities in the other (and in themselves) through co-constituting relationship. They can be said to ‘educe’ knowledge in each other, and the knowledge forming process made possible through this co-constitution can be called ‘eduction.’ In eduction, knowledge is drawn out through relationship: it interacts with its own context; it binds and is binded by, shifts and is shifted by, the relationship between the beings who constitute it in interaction. That these terms share etymological roots with ‘educate’ and ‘education’ make explicit the learning, intersubjectivity, and developmental character of life. Beings, such as humans, who can become aware of their involvement in eductive knowing, bear a responsibility that comes with realizing that how and what they know creates relationships and changes selves. Because knowing necessarily has relational consequences, eduction, unlike solipsistic inferential types, solicits us to approach our interaction with others, of any species, with the care and discretion of an educator.