Introduction to Abduction, Creative Cognition, and Discovery

Abstract

Creativity and discovery are two notions that have consistently and famously aroused hot debates in cognitive science, epistemology, and philosophy of science almost since the dawn of these disciplines. This part of the Handbook of Abductive Cognition proposes to consider abduction as a concept that brings out complex reflections regarding how human agents consider new possibilities, discover new findings, and adopt creative processes to solve problems within and outside the scientific context. In particular, the chapters’ authors offer a way to see abduction as a bridge between concepts linked to creative cognition and scientific processes that are still often discussed and presented as opposed, dichotomous, or simply too distant to be meaningfully connected: creativity and reason, logic and discovery, and a representational view of cognition and theories of embodiment. These authors do so, in part, by referring to the epistemological works done by Peirce, especially on the idea of scientific progress, and, in part, by discussing current and hot debates in cognitive science, philosophy of science, and epistemology. In this introduction, the content of the chapters that compose this part of the Handbook will be briefly introduced and commented on (using the alphabetical order applied to the authors’ surname). At the same time, it will also be presented a discussion that links these contributions together and reflects on the role they play in the broader exploration of abductive cognition.