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Page 159
connect the beans on the table with the sack? I could ask myself whether the beans come from a sack, whether someone brought them there and then left. If I focus my attention on the sack (and why on that sack?) it is because in my head a sort of plausibility appears, such as "It is logical that the beans come from the sack." But there is nothing which guarantees me that my hypothesis is the right one.
In any case, many of the great scientific discoveries proceed in this fashion, but also many of the discoveries of investigators and many of the hypotheses made by doctors, to understand the nature or origin of an illness (and many of the hypotheses of the philologist, to understand what could be in a text where the original manuscript is unclear or contains blanks). Reread (or read) the second story of Don Isidro. Everything that happens to Gervasio Montenegro on the Pan-American train is strange, stupefying, without logic. . . . Don Isidro resolves the problem (the clues that he knows constitute a Result) inferring that it might be the Case of a very different Rule, the Rule of mise-en-scène. If all that happened on the train had been a theatrical representation in which no one was really what he or she seemed to be, then the sequence of events would not have appeared so mysterious. Everything would have been very clear, elementary (Dear Watson). And in fact it was. Montenegro is a fool, and appropriates Don Isidro's solution with the following remark: "The cold speculative intelligence comes to confirm the brilliant intuitions of the artist." Even though he is a liar and a deceiver, he speaks the truth. There is something artistic in a scientific discovery and there is something scientific in that which the naive call "brilliant intuitions of the artist." What they share is the felicity of Abduction.
But in order to choose in a "felicitous" fashion the relevant clues in the tale of Montenegro, it is necessary to have already made a conjecture: that every element of the affair should be read as if it were directly taken from a mise-en-scène. Why does Don Isidro make this conjecture? If we succeed in explaining it to ourselves, we will understand something about the technique of abduction and of Borges's metaphysics.
There are three levels of Abduction. On the first level, the Result is strange and unexplainable, but the Rule already exists somewhere, perhaps inside the same field of problems, and one just must find it, and find it to be the most probable. On the second level, the Rule is difficult to identify. It exists elsewhere, and one must bet that it could be extended to this field of phenomena (this is the case of Kepler). On the third level, the Rule does not exist, and one must invent it: this is the case of Copernicus, who decides that the universe must not be heliocentric for reasons of symmetry and "good form." 5

 
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