Manipulative Abduction

Abstract

The problem of the incommensurability of meaning has distracted the epistemologists from the procedural, extra-sentential and extra-theoretical aspects of scientific practice. Since Kuhn, the problem of translating between languages and of conceptual creativity has dominated the theory of meaning. Manipulative abduction (Figure 1) happens when we are thinking through doing and not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing. So the idea of manipulative abduction goes beyond the well-known role of experiments as capable of forming new scientific laws by means of the results (the nature’s answers to the investigator’s question) they present, or of merely playing a predictive role (in confirmation and in falsification). Manipulative abduction refers to an extra-theoretical behavior that aims at creating communicable accounts of new experiences to integrate them into previously existing systems of experimental and linguistic (theoretical) practices.