Abstract
The process of building new hypotheses can be clarified by the eco-cognitive model (EC-Model) of abduction I have recently introduced. I will take advantage of three examples: (1) a new interpretation of Aristotle’s seminal work on abduction, which stresses the need, to build creative and selective abductive hypotheses, of a situation of eco-cognitive openness, (2) a philosophical example of building new hypotheses, in the case of phenomenology, in which we can take advantage of an abductive interpretation of the concept of adumbration and anticipation, and (3) the abductive discovery in geometry, which illustrates in both a semiotic and distributed perspective, crucial aspects of what I have called manipulative abduction. The first example will also help us to introduce the concept of optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness as one of the main characters of the abductive inferences to new hypotheses. Thanks to these examples we can gain a new vivid perspective on the “constitutive” eco-cognitive character of building hypotheses through abduction.
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For example, selective abduction is active in diagnostic reasoning, where it is merely seen as an activity of “selecting” from an encyclopedia of pre-stored hypotheses; creative abduction instead refers to the building of new hypotheses. I have proposed the dichotomic distinction between selective and creative abduction in Magnani (2001). A recent and clear analysis of this dichotomy and of other classifications emphasizing different aspects of abduction is given in Park (2015).
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Apellicon was the ancient editor of Aristotle’s works. Amazingly, Peirce considers him, in other passages from his writings, “stupid” but also “blundering” and “scamp” (Kraus 2003, p. 248).
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Aristotle insists that all syllogisms are valid; there is no such thing as an invalid syllogism. The syllogistic tradition began to relax this requirement: here I will use the term syllogism in this modern not strictly Aristotelian sense.
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I agree with the following claim by Woods: “Whatever else it is, a dialectical logic is a logic of consequence-drawing” (Woods 2013a, p. 31), that is not merely a logic of “consequence-having”.
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This means that abduction is not necessarily ignorance-preserving (reached hypotheses would always be “presumptive” and to be accepted they always need empirical confirmation). Abduction can creatively build new knowledge by itself, as various examples coming from the area of history of science and other fields of human cognition clearly show. I better supported my claim about the knowledge enhancing character of abduction in the recent (Magnani 2015a, 2016).
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More details are illustrated in Magnani, (2016), section three.
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I have to add that the concept of anticipation is also useful characterize the role of what I have called “unlocked” strategies. I have introduced and illustrated the concepts of locked and unlocked strategies in Magnani (2018).
- 9.
The concept of manipulative abduction—which also takes into account the external dimension of abductive reasoning in an eco-cognitive perspective—captures a large part of scientific thinking where the role of action and of external models (for example diagrams) and devices is central, and where the features of this action are implicit and hard to be elicited. Action can provide otherwise unavailable information that enables the agent to solve problems by starting and by performing a suitable abductive process of generation and/or selection of hypotheses. Manipulative abduction happens when we are thinking through doing and not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing [cf. (Magnani 2009, Chap. 1)].
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The pre-predicative world is not yet characterized by predications, values, empirical manipulations and techniques of measurement as instead the Husserl’s prescientific world is.
- 11.
On the role of adumbrations in the genesis of ideal space and on their abductive and nonmonotonic character cf. below Sect. 2.2. An interesting article (Overgaard and Grünbaum 2007) deals with the relationship between perceptual intentionality, agency, and bodily movement and acknowledges the abductive role of adumbrations. In the remaining part of this section I will try to clarify their meaning.
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Moreover, Husserl thinks that space is endowed with a double function: it is able to constitute a phenomenal extension at the level of sensible data and also furnishes an intentional moment. Petitot says: “Space possesses, therefore, a noetic face (format of passive synthesis) and a noematic one (pure intuition in Kant’s sense)” (Petitot 1999, p. 336).
- 13.
Cf. also (Husserl 1931, Sect. 40, p. 129) [originally published in 1913].
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Husserl uses the terms “kinestetic sensations” and “kinesthetic sequences” to denote the subjective awareness of position and movement in order to distinguish it from the position and movement of perceived objects in space. On some results of neuroscience that corroborate and improve several phenomenological intuitions cf. (Pachoud 1999, pp. 211–216; Barbaras 1999; Petit 1999).
- 15.
The ego itself is only constituted thanks to the capabilities of movement and action.
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The role of adumbrations in objectifying entities can be hypothesized in many cases of nonlinguistic animal cognition dealing with the problem of reification and the formation of a kind of “concept”, cf. chapter five of Magnani (2009). In human adults objects are further individuated and reidentified by using both spatial aspects, such as place and trajectory information and static-property information (in this last case exploiting what was gained through previous adumbration activity); adults use this property information to explain and predict appearances and disappearances: “If the same large, distinctive white rabbit appears in the box and later on in the hat, I assume it’s the same rabbit” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997).
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It is important to note that amodal imagery is neither sentential nor pictorial because the amodal environment space/objects emulators are closely tied to the organism’s sensorimotor engagement with the environment. An interesting example of amodal abduction, in our terms, “where an object cannot currently be sensed by any sensory modality (because it is behind an occluder, is silent and odorless, etc.) yet it is represented as being at a location. I think it is safe to say that our representation of our own behavioral (egocentric) space allows for this, and it is not clear how a multisensory system, in which tags for specific modalities were always present, could accomplish this” (Grush 2004b, p. 434). On Grush’s approach cf. the detailed discussion illustrated in Clark (2008, chapter seven) in the framework of the theory of the extended mind; a treatment of current cognitive theories, such as the sensorimotor theory of perception, which implicitly furnish a scientific account of the phenomenological concept of anticipation, is given in chapter eight of the same book. A detailed treatment of recent neuroscience achievements which confirm the abductive character of perception is given in the article “Vision, thinking, and model-based inferences” (Raftopoulos 2017), recently published in the Handbook of Model-Based Science (Magnani and Bertolotti 2017).
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On the interesting interplay involved in the cooperation between heuristic procedures see the recent (Ulazia 2016): the multiple roles played by analogies in the genesis of fluid mechanics is illustrated together with the fact they can cooperate with other heuristic strategies.
- 19.
The reader interested in further analysis of visual thinking in mathematics can refer to the classical (Giaquinto 2007). The book adopts an epistemological rather than cognitive perspective, also related to the discussion of the status of the Kantian so-called synthetic a priori judgments.
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this article were originally published in chapters five, six and seven of the book The Abductive Structure of Scientific Creativity. An Essay on the Ecology of Cognition, Springer, Switzerland, 2017 and in chapters one and two of the book Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning, Springer, Heidelberg, 2009. For the instructive criticisms and precedent discussions and correspondence that helped me to develop my analysis of abductive cognition I am indebted and grateful to John Woods, Atocha Aliseda, Woosuk Park, Luís Moniz Pereira, Paul Thagard, Ping Li, Athanassios Raftopoulos, Michael Hoffmann, Gerhard Schurz, Walter Carnielli, Akinori Abe, Yukio Ohsawa, Cameron Shelley, Oliver Ray, John Josephson, Ferdinand D. Rivera and to my collaborators Tommaso Bertolotti and Selene Arfini.
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Magnani, L. (2018). How to Build New Hypotheses. In: Danks, D., Ippoliti, E. (eds) Building Theories. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72787-5_13
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