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(what authorizes Don Isidro) to think that the Comendador had a serpent instead of a pumita? Why couldn't he have two terracotta statues? But let's suppose that this clue authorizes Don Isidro to think that the Comendador had lied that evening (and claimed to have a pumita when he actually had a serpent). What causes Don Isidro to think that the Comendador lied in order to discover whether Pumita had rummaged through his drawer?
That Don Isidro stories are full of such clues proves two things: (i) the chatter of the characters is not irrelevant and does not function solely as linguistic parody: it is structurally important; (ii) in order to know how to "read" into the chatter of the characters, Don Isidro must make use of a "key," or rather a very powerful hypothesis. What sort of key is involved?
You see right away that, for the above-mentioned reasons, reading the Don Isidro stories is both challenging and fun. The fact that they are enjoyable should be enough to justify the effort of reading them. Forgive the aesthetic crudeness of my statement; I'm one of those who still (or again) maintain that enjoyment is reason enough to read a story. But here we have a different problem.
The mechanism of the Don Isidro stories anticipates the fundamental mechanism of many of Borges's later stories, perhaps all of them. I will call this mechanism (and I will elaborate in the following section) the mechanism of conjecture in a sick Spinozist universe.
3.
Borges appears to have read everything (and even more, given that he has reviewed nonexistent books). Still, I imagine that he has never read the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. I could be mistaken, but I trust Rodriguez Monegal, and Peirce's name does not appear in the Index of Names at the end of Rodriguez Monegal's biography of Borges. If I am wrong, I am in good company.
In any case, it does not matter to me whether Borges has or has not read Peirce. It seems a good Borgesan procedure to assume that books speak to one another, and so it isn't necessary that writers (who use books in order to speaka hen is the device used by an egg to produce another egg) know one another's works. The fact remains that many of Borges's short stories are perfect exemplifications of that art of inference which Peirce calls abduction or hypothesis, and which is nothing but conjecture.
Peirce claims that we reason according to three modes: Deduction,

 
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