The Script We Write
What Charles Sanders Peirce can teach us about jumping to conclusions
It is early morning and you ask your partner how she is doing. She sets her mug down and just says, “Fine.” No smile, no “How about you?” Just that one flat word.
Right away, your mind shifts into overdrive. Uncertainty is unbearable, so you immediately scaffold it with theories: Maybe she slept poorly. Maybe she’s coming down with something. Or maybe it’s that work presentation she’s been dreading all week.
Within a few seconds, you’ve stitched together a coherent little story. But if you catch yourself in time, an obvious thought might pop up: I’m just guessing. I’ve built an entire script out of four letters.
The nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce spent a great deal of time examining this exact habit. He pointed out that we usually make sense of the world by cycling through three distinct modes of reasoning: abduction, deduction, and induction.
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Most of our quick reactions start with abduction — an educated guess. You hear “Fine,” and your mind immediately reaches for the most convenient explanation: She didn’t sleep well. It is not a proven fact, only the first story that makes this awkward silence feel manageable.
Once you have that guess, deduction takes the wheel: If she didn’t sleep well, she’s going to be annoyed by everything I do or say. It sounds airtight, but the logic depends entirely on whether that first wild guess was correct in the first place.
Then induction chimes in with past experience: Whenever she speaks like this in the morning, we usually end up bickering by dinner.
The trap, as Peirce warned, is how effortlessly we confuse a strong belief with actual knowing. A neat explanation feels so comfortable that we treat it like a proof. We’d rather run with an imaginary problem than sit with the minor awkwardness of simply not knowing yet, even though, in reality, getting out of that downward spiral takes nothing more than a little patience to let the story wait.
The next time you catch yourself convinced you know what someone else is thinking, it might be worth asking: What would actually make me change my mind?
Originally published at https://laurentcailliette.substack.com on October 15, 2026.
