An Abductive Theory of Scientific Reasoning
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Lorenzo Magnani
Abstract
More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and thus not analyzable. The “computational turn” gave us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science tools allow us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual models that we find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. What I call theoretical abduction (sentential and model-based) certainly illustrates much of what is important in abductive reasoning, especially the objective of selecting and creating a set of hypotheses that are able to dispense good (preferred) explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanation occurring in science or in everyday reasoning when the exploitation of the environment is crucial. The concept of manipulative abduction is devoted to capture the role of action in many interesting situations: action provides otherwise unavailable information that enables the agent to solve problems by starting and performing a suitable abductive process of generation or selection of hypotheses. Many external things, usually inert from the epistemological point of view, can be transformed into what I call epistemic mediators, which are illustrated in the last part of the paper.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Abduction: Between Subjectivity and Objectivity
- The Esthetic Attitude of Abduction
- The Semiotic Universe of Abduction
- Masters of Our Own Meaning
- Learning and Abduction
- Shouldn't We be Surprised that We are Not Surprised when We Should be Surprised?
- Interrogatives and Uncontrollable Abductions
- Abduction or the Logic of Surprise
- Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference?
- Dialogic Gradation in the Logic of Interpretation: Deduction, Induction, Abduction
- Abduction: The Logic of Guessing
- Abductive Reasoning in Peirce's and Davidson's Account of Interpretation
- Peirce, Popper, Abduction, and the Idea of a Logic of Discovery
- Abduction as an Aspect of Retroduction
- Abduction and Metaphysical Realism
- An Abductive Theory of Scientific Reasoning
- Abduction: The Double Change
- Peircean Phaneroscopy: The Pervasive Role of Abduction
- The Abduction in Deduction and the Deduction in Abduction: Remarks on Mixed Reasonings
- Creativity: Surprise and Abductive Reasoning
- Artificial Abduction: A Cumulative Evolutionary Process
- The Logic of Abduction in the Light of Peirce's Pragmatism
- Performance of Abduction in the Interpretation of Visual Images
- Abduction and the Semiotics of Perception
- Conjectures Concerning an Uncertain Faculty Claimed for Humans
- Peirce's Late Theory of Abduction: A Comprehensive Account
- The Scent of Truth
Articles in the same Issue
- Abduction: Between Subjectivity and Objectivity
- The Esthetic Attitude of Abduction
- The Semiotic Universe of Abduction
- Masters of Our Own Meaning
- Learning and Abduction
- Shouldn't We be Surprised that We are Not Surprised when We Should be Surprised?
- Interrogatives and Uncontrollable Abductions
- Abduction or the Logic of Surprise
- Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference?
- Dialogic Gradation in the Logic of Interpretation: Deduction, Induction, Abduction
- Abduction: The Logic of Guessing
- Abductive Reasoning in Peirce's and Davidson's Account of Interpretation
- Peirce, Popper, Abduction, and the Idea of a Logic of Discovery
- Abduction as an Aspect of Retroduction
- Abduction and Metaphysical Realism
- An Abductive Theory of Scientific Reasoning
- Abduction: The Double Change
- Peircean Phaneroscopy: The Pervasive Role of Abduction
- The Abduction in Deduction and the Deduction in Abduction: Remarks on Mixed Reasonings
- Creativity: Surprise and Abductive Reasoning
- Artificial Abduction: A Cumulative Evolutionary Process
- The Logic of Abduction in the Light of Peirce's Pragmatism
- Performance of Abduction in the Interpretation of Visual Images
- Abduction and the Semiotics of Perception
- Conjectures Concerning an Uncertain Faculty Claimed for Humans
- Peirce's Late Theory of Abduction: A Comprehensive Account
- The Scent of Truth
