A light form of value realism is defended according to which objective properties of comparison objects make value comparisons true or false. If one object has such a better-making property and another lacks it, this is sufficient for the truth of a corresponding value comparison. However, better-making properties are only necessary and usually not sufficient parts of the justifications of value comparisons. The account is not reductionist; it remains consistent with error-theoretic positions and the view that there are normative facts.

Observational and experimental discoveries of new factual entities such as objects, systems, or processes, are major contributors to some advances in the life sciences. Yet, whereas discovery of theories was extensively deliberated by philosophers of science, very little philosophical attention was paid to the discovery of factual entities. This paper examines historical and philosophical aspects of the experimental discovery by Carl Woese of archaea, prokaryotes that comprise one of the three principal domains of the phylogenetic tree. Borrowing Kuhn’s terminology, this (...) discovery of a major biological entity was made during a ‘normal science’ project of building molecular taxonomy for prokaryotes. Unexpectedly, however, an observed anomaly instigated the discovery of archaea. Substantiation of the existence of the new archaeal entity and consequent reconstruction of the phylogenetic tree prompted replacement of a long-held model of a prokarya and eukarya bipartite tree of life by a new model of a tripartite tree comprising of bacteria, archaea, and eukarya. This paper explores the history and philosophical implications of the progression of Woese’s project from normal science to anomaly-instigated model-changing discovery. It is also shown that the consequential discoveries of RNA splicing and of ribozymes were similarly prompted by unexpected irregularities during normal science activities. It is thus submitted that some discoveries of factual biological entities are triggered by unforeseen observational or experimental anomalies. (shrink)

In a discussion of Sherlock Holmes’ “science of deduction” and the related “method of exclusion,” I show that Holmes’ claim that his inferences are deductive makes sense, if we consider his theoretical presuppositions. So, it is more accurate to say that he tries to reduce abduction to deduction than that he confuses them. His theoretical framework, albeit inadequate as a theory of empirical reasoning, can be seen as a basic model of classical (symbolic) AI. The main problems of this approach (...) are surveyed, and abduction is brought into play as both a better characterization of Holmes’ inferences and a better guide for building AI systems. This is a good background for raising the question of creativity because, according to Peirce, it relates to abduction in a substantial way. Is Sherlock Holmes creative? Can machines be creative? An affirmative answer to the second question might be given by a “logic of discovery” but the problem remains that inventing such a logic already presupposes creativity. (shrink)

Design has usually been linked to art and applied in scenarios related to everyday life. Even when design has, on occasion, made its way into the world of academia, it has always been closely linked to art and scenarios related everyday life. At last, however, the idea of design has reached the field of epistemology: an area within the very heart of philosophy that has always focused, in theory, on the foundations of knowledge. Consequently, design is being studied from different (...) approaches interested in the foundation of knowledge, theoretical and practical. This is one of the reasons why abduction and pragmatism have been considered relevant from a design perspective. This paper first shows the main features of abduction and pragmatism, describes their evolution and considers their mutual implications. Second, the epistemology of design is analysed considering its most relevant characteristics. Third, the connection between abduction and, on the one hand, pragmatism and, on the other, design epistemology is addressed. Finally, the role of abductive inference in grounding a real epistemology for design theory from the naturalised cognitive perspective of abduction is outlined. The central proposition is that this approach is essential as a methodological innovation, as it allows us to analyse both the inquiry process and the design process as interdependent when dealing with practical problems of a social and cultural nature. This approach allows us to analyse how human actions determine changes in the theoretical framework from which we make our inquiry. In short, the world is an open-ended project that humans design through our daily inquiry. (shrink)

Reverse inference is a crucial inferential strategy used in cognitive neuroscience to derive conclusions about the engagement of cognitive processes from patterns of brain activation. While widely employed in experimental studies, it is now viewed with increasing scepticism within the neuroscience community. One problem with reverse inference is that it is logically invalid, being an instance of abduction in Peirce’s sense. In this paper, we offer the first systematic analysis of reverse inference as a form of abductive reasoning and highlight (...) some relevant implications for the current debate. We start by formalising an important distinction that has been entirely neglected in the literature, namely the distinction between weak and strong reverse inference. Then, we rely on case studies from recent neuroscientific research to systematically discuss the role and limits of both strong and weak reverse inference; in particular, we offer the first exploration of weak reverse inference as a discovery strategy within cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

“What data will show the truth?” is a fundamental question emerging early in any empirical investigation. From a statistical perspective, experimental design is the appropriate tool to address this question by ensuring control of the error rates of planned data analyses and of the ensuing decisions. From an epistemological standpoint, planned data analyses describe in mathematical and algorithmic terms a pre-specified mapping of observations into decisions. The value of exploratory data analyses is often less clear, resulting in confusion about what (...) characteristics of design and analysis are necessary for decision making and what may be useful to inspire new questions. This point is addressed here by illustrating the Popper-Miller theorem in plain terms and using a graphical support. Popper and Miller proved that probability estimates cannot generate hypotheses on behalf of investigators. Consistently with Popper-Miller, we show that probability estimation can only reduce uncertainty about the truth of a merely possible hypothesis. This fact clearly identifies exploratory analysis as one of the tools supporting a dynamic process of hypothesis generation and refinement which cannot be purely analytic. A clear understanding of these facts will enable stakeholders, mathematical modellers and data analysts to better engage on a level playing field when designing experiments and when interpreting the results of planned and exploratory data analyses. (shrink)

Inspired by Bermúdez’s notion of proto-logic, I would like to fathom what the true proto-logic could be like. But this will be approached only in a negative way of figuring out what it could not be. I shall argue that it could not be purely deductive by exploiting the recent researches in logic of maps. This will allow us to reorient the search for proto-logic, starting with animal abduction. I will also suggest that proto-logic won’t get off the ground without (...) proto-geometry. These negative results will shed some lights on some further conceptual and historical issues around the language of thought hypothesis to arrive at the true proto-logic. (shrink)

This special issue for the Journal for General Philosophy of Science is devoted to exploring the impact and many ramifications of current research in evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is an inter- and multidisciplinary area of research that can be divided into two ever-inclusive research avenues. One research avenue expands on the EEM program and investigates the epistemology of evolution. The other research avenue builds on the EET program and researches the evolution of epistemology. Since its conception, EE has developed three (...) schools of thought: adaptationist, non-adaptationist, and applied EE. Although diverse in outlook and theoretical background, these research avenues and schools share the same agenda of understanding how knowledge evolves, and how it relates to the world. In this paper, we first explain wherefrom evolutionary epistemological schools of thought developed, and then we highlight current debates in EE by briefly reviewing the papers that form part of this special issue. (shrink)

The background target of the research going into the present article is to forge an intellectual alliance between, on the one hand, active inference and the free-energy principle (FEP), and on the other, Charles S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics and pragmatism. In the present paper, the focus is on the allegiance between the nomenclatures of active and abductive inferences as the proper place to begin reaching at that wider target. The paper outlines the key conceptual elements involved in a naturalistic (...) rendering of Peirce’s late semiotic and logical notion of abductive reasoning. The target is a cognitive-biological model of abduction which preserves the functional integrity of an organism and fulfils the existential imperative for living beings’ evidence of existence. Such a model is an adaptation of Peirce’s late logical schema of abduction proposed in his largely unpublished works during the early 20th century. The proposed model is argued to be a feasible sketch also of recent breakthroughs in computational (sensu Bayesian) cognitive science. (shrink)

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it is shown how conceptual spaces are fundamentally linked to the meaning effects of particular natural languages and (...) these are very different from the global and universal aspects of Euclidean spaces. Thirdly, it is contended that these modes of creating body and culture-based spatial frameworks and related cosmogonies and cosmologies can be described as forms of “latent geometry” that initially appear unexplainable in any rational way. Nonetheless, and thanks to the deep mathematical reflections provided by René Thom, it is illustrated how the various ways of generating space can be further analyzed as distortions of mainstream spatialization furnished by Euclidean geometry that established the dominant universality of the ideas of space (and time). (shrink)

This article discusses the epistemology of design as a process, arguing specifically that sketching and drawing are essential modes of thinking and reasoning. It demonstrates that the commonly accepted notion of a spontaneous and intuitive vision in the mind’s eye—encapsulated in the cliché of the napkin sketch—obscures the exploratory inferences that are made while scribbling with a pencil on a sheet of paper. The draughtsperson, along with their work tools, modes of notation, specific techniques, and epistemic strategies as well as (...) the resulting design artefacts form milieus of reflection that facilitate complex processes of exploration. Case studies, including the genesis of the Mini by Alec Issigonis, samples of work by Alvar Aalto, and a reinterpretation of student sketches from a classical design study by Gabriela Goldschmidt, serve to illustrate how drawing inferences with pencil and paper occurs. (shrink)

I will analyse three fundamental ways of governing ignorance though abduction, which are essential from an eco-cognitive and eco-logical point of view, in which the central role in human cognition of natural and artefactual environment is taken into account. First of all, according to the so-called GW-schema, proposed by Gabbay and Woods, abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character: given the fact that the abduced hypotheses aim at becoming truths, the basic ignorance is neither solved nor left untouched. Second, I (...) will contend that abduction is not always ignorance preserving but also knowledge enhancing. Indeed, according to the eco-cognitive model of abduction, I myself have recently proposed, we can easily see that, occasionally, knowledge can be immediately increased (and ignorance ‘killed’) through abduction: in this perspective, abduction does not have to be rigidly conceptualized as an inference to the best explanation in the received sense, which is as an inference that, to grant truth, also takes advantage of an empirical evaluation phase or an inductive phase, as Peirce classified it. Finally, it is important to stress that abductive cognition is at the roots of two fundamental cognitive processes. On one side, abductive cognition constructs (and/or takes advantage of the exploitation of) embodiments, external representations, enactions, artefacts and props, which involve ignorant entities suitably transformed in cognitive representations and/or devices. On the other side, abductive cognition dominates those ‘special’ cognitive creative processes that lead to what I call the disseminated ‘computational domestication of ignorant entities’: I will illustrate the example of the recent unconventional computational domestication of ignorant entities, which creates novel cognitive embodiments (morphological computation). (shrink)

Here, I focus on deviations of intent, from that expressed by the standard or ordinary use of language, in instances where abductive reasoning plays a necessary role. In such cases, speakers usually utter some “mysterious” words based on the assumed abductive capability of their interlocutors. In order to cause the desired effect in the audience, the speaker relies on the hearer’s knowledge of the relevant common dialogue framework and thus uses the utterance as an abductive trigger. For purposes of explanation, (...) I present a curious kind of fallacy: ironic fallacy. (shrink)

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

Efforts to formalize qualitative accounts of inference to the best explanation (IBE) confront two obstacles: the imprecise nature of such accounts and the unusual logical properties that explanations exhibit, such as contradiction-intolerance and irreflexivity. This paper aims to surmount these challenges by utilising a new, more precise theory that treats explanations as expressions that codify defeasible inferences. To formalise this account, we provide a sequent calculus in which IBE serves as an elimination rule for a connective that exhibits many of (...) the properties associated with the behaviour of the English expression ‘That... best explains why ... ’. We first construct a calculus that encodes these properties at the level of the turnstile, i.e. as a metalinguistic expression for classes of defeasible consequence relations. We then show how this calculus can be conservatively extended over a language that contains a best-explains-why operator. (shrink)

During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discovery, the philosophical literature has hardly paid attention to the cognitive significance of serendipity, accepting rather than examining some of its most specific features, such as its game-changing effect, the (...) unexpectedness of its occurrence, and its affinity with the concept of “luck”. Thus, in this paper we aim at analyzing these characteristics in the light of their cognitive implications in the recognition, performance, and possible stimulation of serendipitous events in relation to scientific discoveries. (shrink)

An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which select an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical concepts and models. The article focuses on creative abductions, which are essential for scientific progress, although they are rarely discussed in the literature. Scientifically, fruitful creative abductions are demarcated from purely speculative abductions by means of three virtues which are possessed by the former but not by the latter: (i) providing unification, (ii) detecting common (...) causes and (iii) generating novel predictions by means of which they can be independently tested. Based on historical examples it is demonstrated that common cause abduction from correlated dispositions is the fundamental abductive operation by which new theoretical concepts and models are scientifically generated. Statistical factor analysis can be regarded as a statistical generalization of common cause abduction. (shrink)

Based upon papers given at a 2011 conference at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, this book crosses many boundaries. Most obviously, it includes a balanced set of contributions by philosophers and cognitive scientists from a variety of countries: Nine of the authors are based in Europe, eight in Asia, and one in North America. The conference was the latest of three held in Guangzhou between 2004 and 2011; the editors are to be congratulated for their extensive and continuing efforts (...) to open windows among philosophers and cognitive scientists across continents. (shrink)

From the perspective of distributed cognition I will stress how abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc., but also kinesthetic – related to the ability to sense the position and location and orientation and movement of the body and its parts – and motor experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The presence of kinesthetic and motor (...) aspects demonstrates that abductive reasoning can be manipulative. We can also see, in this regard, how implicit factors take part in the abductive procedure, which consequently acquires the character of a kind of “thinking through doing”. This paper further describes 1) the fact that hypotheses in science can be built through different cognitive mediators and so they can also model the same cognitive aspect in different ways; how they can be carriers/ producers of knowledge in a multimodal way; 2) the problem of the possible non-explanatory and instrumental nature of abductive reasoning and the analysis of the consequences for induction; 3) the role of manipulative abduction in building new evidence/ experiments and how they trigger smart inductive inferences. (shrink)

Many important concepts of the calculus are difficult to grasp, and they may appear epistemologically unjustified. For example, how does a real function appear in “small” neighborhoods of its points? How does it appear at infinity? Diagrams allow us to overcome the difficulty in constructing representations of mathematical critical situations and objects. For example, they actually reveal the behavior of a real function not “close to” a point but “in” the point. We are interested in our research in the diagrams (...) which play an optical role –microscopes and “microscopes within microscopes”, telescopes, windows, a mirror role, and an unveiling role. In this paper we describe some examples of optical diagrams as a particular kind of epistemic mediator able to perform the explanatory abductive task of providing a better understanding of the calculus, through a non-standard model of analysis. We also maintain they can be used in many other different epistemological and cognitive situations. (shrink)

The use of intuition and emotion in reasoning or in building hypothesis has been discussed through varied approaches within many disciplines. Emanuele Bardone provides new insights into these issues, such as the idea of human cognition as a chance-seeking system. This perspective creates a new framework when considering the decision-making and problem solving challenges. One of the key concepts that Bardone discusses at length is affordances, the relation of affordances to abduction and to the eco-cognitive niche. Worth mentioning are also: (...) niche construction and the notion of humans as ecological engineers. All these concepts use, and build upon, the idea of distributed cognition. (shrink)

This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...) be equated with explanatory power and considered to be derivable from the other explanatory virtues: unification, explanatory depth and simplicity. (shrink)

In this paper, the radical view that transparent equipment is the result of an ecological assembly between tool users and physical aspects of the world is critically assessed. According to this perspective, tool users are normally viewed as plastically organized hybrid agents. In this view, such agents are able to interact with tools (artefacts or technologies) in ways that are opportunistic and fully locked to the local task environment. This intimate and flexible interaction would provide grounds for the thesis that (...) cognitive agents and tools constitute literal extended cognitive systems. By contrast, a revised understanding of tool use transparency will be attempted. In this perspective, the interplay between on-line and off-line thinking is understood in terms of a socially reified cognitive delegation that subsumes the advantages normally associated to the so-called ‘open-ended ecological controllers.’ Thus, the notion of transparent technologies can be explored on the basis of a derived or mediated cognitive delegation. This view will be complemented by the notion of communities of practice (CoP). Special sorts of CoP will be proposed as suitable and flexible cognitive environments for the development of tool transparency. (shrink)

Bayesian probability is normally defined over a fixed language or eventspace. But in practice language is susceptible to change, and thequestion naturally arises as to how Bayesian degrees of belief shouldchange as language changes. I argue here that this question poses aserious challenge to Bayesianism. The Bayesian may be able to meet thischallenge however, and I outline a practical method for changing degreesof belief over changes in finite propositional languages.

It is suggested that Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics provides a framework for a diagrammatic representation of a sign's proper structure. The action of signs is described at the logical and psychological levels. The role of (unconscious) abductive inference is analyzed, and a diagram of reasoning is offered. A series of interpretants transform brute facts into interpretable signs thereby providing human experience with value or meaning. The triadic structure helps in de-mystifying the relations between Penrose's three worlds when the latter (...) are considered as constituting a semiotic triangle. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the kind of inference used in the reconstruction of proto-languages. Hypothesis is at the core of this reconstruction process and this, together with the structure of reasoning involved, indicates abductive reasoning. We analyse abductive reasoning, and specify its nuances and particularities. The novelty we introduce is the importance of context as we focus on a form of abduction that goes beyond the context in which the scientific work is being developed by incorporating (...) contexts from other sciences. Therefore, an intercontextual chain of inference can be part of abductive reasoning processes and the resulting hypothesis remains provisional. Several disciplines, such as archaeology, history and linguistics, play a cognitive role in the reconstruction of proto-languages, thus requiring more than one context. We use the case of the reconstruction of proto-Semitic and the unexpected fact of the Ugarit and Ebla discoveries (plus Amorite names). This sample may shed light on the use of abduction to explain certain scientific practices. (shrink)

I will take it that general intelligence is intelligence of the kind that a typical human being—Fred, say—manifests in his role as a cognitive agent, that is, as an acquirer, receiver and circulator of knowledge in his cognitive economy. Framed in these terms, the word “general” underserves our ends. Hereafter our questions will bear upon the all-purpose intelligence of beings like Fred. Frederika appears as Fred’s AI-counterpart, not as a fully programmed and engineered being, but as a presently unrealized theoretical (...) construct. Our basic question is whether it is in principle possible to equip Frederika to do what Fred does as an all-purpose participant in his own cognitive economy. Can she achieve a sufficiency of relevant similarity to him to allow us to say that she herself can do what Fred can do, perhaps even better? One of the things that Fred can do—or at least could learn from experience to do—is discharge the duties of an Appeals Court judge. As set down in the ancient doctrine of lex non scripta, Fred must be able to detect, understand and correctly apply certain tacit and implicit rules of law which defy express propositional formulation and linguistic articulation. Fred has an even more widespread capacity for the epistemically tacit and implicit, clearly one of his most cost-saving kinds of intelligence. Indeed, most by far of what Fred will ever know he will know tacitly and implicitly. So we must ask: how tightly bound to the peculiarities of Fred’s cognitive enablement conditions is the character of the intelligence that he manifests? And how far down Fred’s causal make-up does intelligence actually go? (shrink)

Three competing ‘methods’ have been endorsed for inferring phylogenetic hypotheses: parsimony, likelihood, and Bayesianism. The latter two have been claimed superior because they take into account rates of sequence substitution. Can rates of substitution be justified on its own accord in inferences of explanatory hypotheses? Answering this question requires addressing four issues: (1) the aim of scientific inquiry, (2) the nature of why-questions, (3) explanatory hypotheses as answers to why-questions, and (4) acknowledging that neither parsimony, likelihood, nor Bayesianism are inferential (...) actions leading to explanatory hypotheses. The aim of scientific inquiry is to acquire causal understanding of effects. Observation statements of organismal characters lead to implicit or explicit why-questions. Those questions, conveyed in data matrices, assume the truth of observation statements, which is contrary to subsequently invoking substitution rates within inferences to phylogenetic hypotheses. Inferences of explanatory hypotheses are abductive in form, such that some version of an evolutionary theory(ies) is/are included or implied. If rates of sequence evolution are to be considered, it must be done prior to, rather than within abduction, which requires renaming those putatively-shared nucleotides subject to substitution rates. There are, however, no epistemic grounds for renaming characters to accommodate rates, calling into question the legitimacy of causally accounting for sequence data. (shrink)

La discusión sobre el psicologismo lógico, que parecía ya superada desde Frege-Husserl, ha vuelto a posicionarse hoy en la filosofía de la lógica. Se examina, en primer lugar, la idea según la cual lo que hoy se entiende por lógica respondería en lo esencial a las tesis defendidas por el anti-psicologismo. En segundo término, se plantea que algunos enfoques actuales en ciencia cognitiva, como el de la facultad cognitiva proto-lógica de R.Hanna, y el de los dominios cognitivos, de Stennings y (...) van Lambalgen, permiten apoyar la idea de que la naturaleza de la lógica va más allá de los atributos antipsicologistas. (shrink)

In this article I am going to reconstruct Stephen Toulmin’s procedural theory of concepts and explanations in order to develop two overlooked ideas from his philosophy of science: methods of representations and inferential techniques. I argue that these notions, when properly articulated, could be useful for shedding some light on how scientific reasoning is related to representational structures, concepts, and explanation within scientific practices. I will explore and illustrate these ideas by studying the development of the notion of instantaneous speed (...) during the passage from Galileo’s geometrical physics to analytical mechanics. At the end, I will argue that methods of representations could be considered as constitutive of scientific inference; and I will show how these notions could connect with other similar ideas from contemporary philosophy of science like those of models and model-based reasoning. (shrink)

Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based reasoning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particular, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and (...) engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering practices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery. (shrink)

In her book Abductive Reasoning Atocha Aliseda stresses the attention to the logical models of abduction, centering on the semantic tableaux as a method for extending and improving both the whole cognitive/philosophical view on it and on other more restricted logical approaches. I will describe the importance of increasing logical knowledge on abduction also taking advantage of some ideas coming from the so-called distributed cognition where logical models are seen as forms of cognitive externalizations of preexistent in-formal human reasoning performances.

A constantly changing social reality means economic theories, even if correct today, need to be constantly revised, updated, or abandoned. To maintain an up-to-date understanding of its subject matter, economists have to continuously assess their theories even those that appear to be empirically corroborated. Economics could gain from a method that describes and is capable of generating novel explanatory hypotheses. A pessimistic view on the existence of such a method was famously articulated by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific (...) Discovery. He wrote ‘there is no such a thing as a logical method of having ideas or a logical reconstruction of this process.’ Herbert Simon responded to Popper and argued the opposite, namely, that there is a model of discovery and its name is abduction. Simon acknowledges his debt to Charles Peirce – the first modern logician to explicitly formulate a theory of abduction – and explains that abduction is a model of discovery that works as a problem-solving heuristic encoded.. (shrink)

Toulmin is famously seen as the progenitor of informal logic and the related theory of argument and is first among many who seek to move the study of argument away from its roots in formal, especially mathematical, logic. Toulmin’s efforts, however, have been substantively criticized by Harvey Siegel, among others, for failing to offer the sort of foundation that, according to Siegel, even Toulmin sees to be required lest the theory of inquiry fall to impotent relativism. What I will attempt (...) to indicate in this paper is, that although Toulmin is correct in rejecting mathematical logic as standardly construed as an adequate theory of argument, and logical empiricist constructions as an adequate basis for the philosophical understanding of science, there is a significant role for metamathematics in the new logic. In particular, I will show how a formal model based on mature physical science rather than arithmetic furnishes crucial support to Toulmin, furnishing philosophical metaphors that afford the foundational support required for normativity and the clarification of key logical concepts required for a robust normative theory of argument in the context of inquiry. (shrink)

In his influential paper, 'Why Was the Logic of Discovery Abandoned?', Laudan contends that there has been no philosophical rationale for a logic of discovery since the emergence of consequentialism in the 19th century. It is the purpose of this paper to show that consequentialism does not involve the rejection of all types of logic of discovery. Laudan goes too far in his interpretation of the historical shift from generativism to consequentialism, and his claim that the context of pursuit belongs (...) to neither discovery nor justification is based on narrow interpretations of the contexts of discovery and justification. As a result, Laudan draws unwarranted conclusions concerning both the early and contemporary defenders of a logic of discovery. A methodological logic of discovery - which involves self-corrective methods of hypothesis generation that promote the long-term goals of science and which require consequential support for justification - is a type of logic of discovery that survives the shift to consequentialism. (shrink)

This article describes abductions as special patterns of inference to the best explanation whose structure determines a particularly promising abductive conjecture and thus serves as an abductive search strategy. A classification of different patterns of abduction is provided which intends to be as complete as possible. An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which choose an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical models or concepts. While selective abduction has dominated the (...) literature, creative abductions are rarely discussed, although they are essential in science. The article introduces several kinds of creative abductions, such as theoretical model abduction, common cause abduction and statistical factor analysis, and illustrates them by various real case examples. It is suggested to demarcate scientifically fruitful abductions from purely speculative abductions by the criterion of causal unification. (shrink)

This article presents silence as a cognitive tool to comprehend the environment. Two dimensions of silence are addressed: a natural mechanism and human beings' social and cultural construction. There is a link between these two dimensions because, on the one hand, agents' cognitive strategies based on silence influence how meanings and uses of silence have been constructed. The meanings of silence we use are contextual shapers of silence-based cognitive strategies. Silence is analyzed as a resource for coping with ambiguity: situations (...) perceived as uncertain provoke doubt and confusion because they can be understood differently or suggest different interpretations. These situations can occur in the face of epistemic disruption. The consequence is a transfer of the ambiguity property of these situations to the usual ways of relating to the world and people. The cognitive approach is based here on a semiotic-hermeneutic interpretation of silence from a phenomenological perspective. This accounts for a paradox: even if silence does not exist (the world is acoustic), it is real. The silence experience is a non-inferential cognitive capacity located at the base of perception: a stimulus that suggests a particular gesture as an action different from the usual one to deal with the environment. (shrink)

Framing systematics as a field consistent with scientific inquiry entails that inferences of phylogenetic hypotheses have the goal of producing accounts of past causal events that explain differentially shared characters among organisms. Linking observations of characters to inferences occurs by way of why-questions implied by data matrices. Because of their form, why-questions require the use of common-cause theories. Such theories in phylogenetic inferences include natural selection and genetic drift. Selection or drift can explain ‘morphological’ characters but selection cannot be causally (...) applied to sequences since fitness differences cannot be directly associated with individual nucleotides or amino acids. The relation of selection to sequence data is by way of downward or top-down causation from those phenotypes upon which selection occurs. The application of phylogenetic inference to explain sequence data is thus restricted to instances where drift is the relevant theory; those nucleotides or amino acids that can be explained via downward causation are precluded from inclusion in the data matrix. The restrictions on the inclusion of sequence data in phylogenetic inferences equally apply to species hypotheses, precluding the more restrictive approach known as DNA barcoding. Not being able to discern drift and selection as relevant causal mechanisms can severely constrain the inclusion and explanations of sequence data. Implications of such exclusion are discussed in relation to the requirement of total evidence. (shrink)

We propose a logic of abduction that (i) provides an appropriate formalization of the explanatory conditional, and that (ii) captures the defeasible nature of abductive inference. For (i), we argue that explanatory conditionals are non-classical, and rely on Brian Chellas’s work on conditional logics for providing an alternative formalization of the explanatory conditional. For (ii), we make use of the adaptive logics framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. We show how our proposal allows for a more natural reading of explanatory relations, (...) and how it overcomes problems faced by other systems in the literature. (shrink)

ArgumentUsing a striking example from the history of applied psychology, the concept of accident proneness, this paper suggests that historians of science may still find viable the idea of simultaneous discovery or construction of a scientific idea. Accident proneness was discovered independently in Germany and in Britain during the period of World War I. Later on, in 1926, the idea was independently formulated and named in both countries. The evidence shows not only striking simultaneity but true novelty and commensurateness of (...) the two formulations that crystallized at the same time in parallel, but distinctly separate, settings. (shrink)

Abduction and metaphor are two significant concepts in cognitive science. It is found that the both mental processes are on the basis of certain similarity. The similarity inspires us to seek the answers to the following two questions: (1) Whether there is a common cognitive mechanism behind abduction and metaphor? And (2) if there is, whether this common mechanism could be interpreted within the unified frame of modern intelligence theory? Centering on these two issues, the paper attempts to characterize and (...) interpret the generation and evolution of scientific metaphors from the perspective of the cognitive mechanism of abductive inference. Then it interprets the common cognitive mechanism behind abduction and metaphor within Hawkins’ frame of intelligence theory. The commonality between abduction and metaphor indicates the potential to further explore human intelligence. (shrink)

Philosophers of science today by and large reject the cataclysmic and irrational interpretation of the scientific enterprise claimed by Kuhn. Many computational models have been implemented to rationally study the conceptual change in science. In this recent tradition a key role is played by the concept of abduction as a mechanism by which new explanatory hypotheses are introduced. Nevertheless some problems in describing the most interesting abductive issues rise from the classical computational approach. It describes a cognitive process (and so (...) abduction) by the manipulation of internal symbolic representations of external world. This view assumes a discrete set of representations fixed in discrete time jumps, and cannot adequately account for the issue of anticipation and causation of a new hypothesis. An integration of the traditional computational view with some ideas developed inside the so-called dynamical approach can suggest some important insights. The concept of attractor is very significant. It permits a description of the abductive generation of new hypotheses in terms of a catastrophic rearrangement of the parameters responsible for the behavior of the system. (shrink)

Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, finally, to the need of defending and enhancing human autonomy. My precise concern in this article will be the examination of the role (...) of the human cognitive processes that give rise to the most important ways of tracking the external world and human behavior in their relationship to some central aspects of human autonomy, also to the aim of clarifying the link between autonomy and the ownership of our own destinies. I will also focus on the preservation of human autonomy as an important component of human dignity, seeing it as strictly associated with knowledge and, even more significantly, with the constant production of new and pertinent knowledge of various kinds. I will also describe the important _paradox of autonomy_, which resorts to the fact that, on one side, cognitions (from science to morality, from common knowledge to philosophy, etc.) are necessary to be able to perform autonomous actions and decisions because we need believe in rules that justify and identify our choices, but, on the other side, these same rules can become (for example, as a result of contrasting with other internalized and approved moral rules or knowledge contents) oppressive norms that diminish autonomy and can thus, paradoxically, defeat agents’ autonomous capacity “to take ownership”. (shrink)

Whether abduction is treated as an argument or as an inference, the mainstream view presupposes a tight connection between abduction and inference to the best explanation. This paper critically evaluates this link and supports a narrower view on abduction. Our main thesis is that merely the hypothesis-generative aspect, but not the evaluative aspect, is properly abductive in the sense introduced by C. S. Peirce. We show why equating abduction with IBE unnecessarily complicates argument evaluation by levelling the status of abduction (...) as a third reasoning mode. We also propose a scheme for abductive argument along with critical questions, and suggest retaining abduction alongside IBE as related but distinct categories. (shrink)

Philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of describing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and then not analysable. Those descriptions are often so far from Peircian pragmatic prescription and so abstract to result completely unknowable and obscure. The “computational turn” gives us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. In fact, by exploiting artificial intelligence and cognitive science tools, computational philosophy allows (...) us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived only in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual computational models that I find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. Creativity and discovery are no more seen as a mysterious irrational process, but, thanks to constructive accounts, as a complex relationship among different inferential steps that can be clearly analysed and identified. I maintain that the computational philosophy analysis of model-based and manipulative abduction and of external and epistemic mediators is important not only to delineate the actual practice of abduction, but also to further enhance the development of programs computationally adequate in rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, for example, scientific hypotheses or mathematical theorems. (shrink)

The author suggests that educational philosophy should benefit from addressing questions traditionally asked within discourse in the philosophy of mind, namely: the relation between the mind and world and the problems of intentionality , meaning, and representation. Peirce's semiotics and his category of creative abduction provide a novel conceptual framework for exploring these questions. A model of reasoning and learning, based on Peirce's triadic logic of relations, is analysed. This model, it is argued, is fruitful for overcoming the paradox of (...) new knowledge that was first debated by Socrates in his dialogue with Meno. (shrink)

This paper reviews the psychological investigation of reasoning with conditionals, putting an emphasis on recent work. In the first part, a few methodological remarks are presented. In the second part, the main theories of deductive reasoning (mental rules, mental models, and the probabilistic approach) are considered in turn; their content is summarised and the semantics they assume for if and the way they explain formal conditional reasoning are discussed, in particular in the light of experimental work on the probability of (...) conditionals. The last part presents the recent shift of interest towards the study of conditional reasoning in context, that is, with large knowledge bases and uncertain premises. (shrink)