deutsch»Creativity in Science«
Lecture of Prof. Lorenzo Magnani
Saturday, October 27th, 2012, 12:15 – 13:15
The main aim of my presentation will be the description of the fundamental aspects of creative and expert inferences in science taking advantage of high-level methods of abductive reasoning, situated at the crossroads of philosophy, logic, epistemology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theories; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. The concept of abduction is still controversial. What are the differences between abduction and induction? What are the differences between abduction and the well-known hypothetico-deductive method? What did Peirce mean when he considered abduction both a kind of inference and a kind of instinct or when he considered perception a kind of abduction? Does abduction involve only the generation of hypotheses or their evaluation too? Are the criteria for the best explanation in abductive reasoning epistemic, or pragmatic, or both? Does abduction preserve ignorance or extend truth or both? How many kinds of abduction are there? Is abduction merely a kind of „explanatory“ inference or does it involve other non-explanatory or instrumental ways of guessing hypotheses?
To answer these questions the interdisciplinary character of abduction is central; in turn its fertility in various areas of research, such as epistemology, is evident. An interesting and neglected point of contention about human reasoning is whether or not concrete manipulations of external objects influence the generation of hypotheses, for example in science. I will provide an indepth analysis of what I have called manipulative abduction, showing how we can find methods of constructivity in scientific and everyday reasoning based on external models and cognitive and epistemic mediators. I will also stress the „multimodal“ character of abduction, which refers to the various aspects of abductive reasoning, neurological, verbal-propositional, sentential, emotional,and manipulative. Multimodal abduction is also appropriate when taking into account the dynamics of the hybrid interplay of the aspects above and the semiotic role played, especially in scientific cognition, by what I call „semiotic anchors“. These anchors constitute ways of favoring hybrid reasoning in various cognitive and epistemic tasks and they play an important role in that event of „externalization of the mind“ that researchers such as Andy Clark, Edwin Hutchins, Steven Mithen and others have labeled in various ways, ultimately resorting to the idea of the importance of the external cognitive tools and mediators in cognition.
Indeed, creative abductive reasoning is a risky sort of inference that constitutes a central process in conceptual change in science, mathematics, and logic and its embodied and distributed aspects in what I call epistemic mediators constitute a central issue. Cognitive, neurological, semiotic and epistemological aspects of that „externalization of the mind“ I have quoted above also drive to the importance of the concepts of mimetic and creative representations and of „mimetic mind“ in on-line and off-line intelligence. An example of hybrid abductive processes that are occurring in science is provided by the case of external diagrammatization and iconic brain coevolution.
Finally, abductive cognition clearly demonstrates that, as a matter of fact, humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They build models, representations, and other various mediating structures, that are considered to aid thought. In doing these, humans are engaged in a process of cognitive niche construction. In this sense, I will argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays of hypothetical (abductive) cognition between individuals and the environment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing fleeting thoughts, private ideas, etc., into external supports. Hence, cognitive niche construction (and epistemic niche construction, in the case of science) may also contribute to making a great portion of knowledge available that would otherwise remain simply unexpressed or unreachable. Abductive cognition is a central driver of those designing activities that are closely related to the process of so-called „niche construction“. The exploitation of this basically biological concept seems useful to study all those situations that require the transmission and sharing of knowledge, information and, more generally, cognitive and epistemic resources. It is also interesting to stress that in dealing with the exploitation of cognitive resources embedded in the environment, the notion of affordance, originally proposed by James J. Gibson to illustrate the hybrid character of visual perception, is relevant: abduction may also fruitfully describe all those human and animal hypothetical inferences that are operated through actions made up of smart manipulations to both detect „new“ affordances and to „create“ manufactured external objects that offer new affordances/cues.
Lorenzo Magnani, philosopher and cognitive scientist, is a professor at the University of Pavia, Italy, and the director of its Computational Philosophy Laboratory. He is visiting professor at the Sun Yat-sen University, Canton (Guangzhou), China. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at The City University of New York and currently directs international research programs in the EU, USA, and China.
1998: he started the series of International Conferences on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR).
Since 2011: he is the editor of the Book Series Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE), Springer, Heidelberg/Berlin.
To answer these questions the interdisciplinary character of abduction is central; in turn its fertility in various areas of research, such as epistemology, is evident. An interesting and neglected point of contention about human reasoning is whether or not concrete manipulations of external objects influence the generation of hypotheses, for example in science. I will provide an indepth analysis of what I have called manipulative abduction, showing how we can find methods of constructivity in scientific and everyday reasoning based on external models and cognitive and epistemic mediators. I will also stress the „multimodal“ character of abduction, which refers to the various aspects of abductive reasoning, neurological, verbal-propositional, sentential, emotional,and manipulative. Multimodal abduction is also appropriate when taking into account the dynamics of the hybrid interplay of the aspects above and the semiotic role played, especially in scientific cognition, by what I call „semiotic anchors“. These anchors constitute ways of favoring hybrid reasoning in various cognitive and epistemic tasks and they play an important role in that event of „externalization of the mind“ that researchers such as Andy Clark, Edwin Hutchins, Steven Mithen and others have labeled in various ways, ultimately resorting to the idea of the importance of the external cognitive tools and mediators in cognition.
Indeed, creative abductive reasoning is a risky sort of inference that constitutes a central process in conceptual change in science, mathematics, and logic and its embodied and distributed aspects in what I call epistemic mediators constitute a central issue. Cognitive, neurological, semiotic and epistemological aspects of that „externalization of the mind“ I have quoted above also drive to the importance of the concepts of mimetic and creative representations and of „mimetic mind“ in on-line and off-line intelligence. An example of hybrid abductive processes that are occurring in science is provided by the case of external diagrammatization and iconic brain coevolution.
Finally, abductive cognition clearly demonstrates that, as a matter of fact, humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They build models, representations, and other various mediating structures, that are considered to aid thought. In doing these, humans are engaged in a process of cognitive niche construction. In this sense, I will argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays of hypothetical (abductive) cognition between individuals and the environment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing fleeting thoughts, private ideas, etc., into external supports. Hence, cognitive niche construction (and epistemic niche construction, in the case of science) may also contribute to making a great portion of knowledge available that would otherwise remain simply unexpressed or unreachable. Abductive cognition is a central driver of those designing activities that are closely related to the process of so-called „niche construction“. The exploitation of this basically biological concept seems useful to study all those situations that require the transmission and sharing of knowledge, information and, more generally, cognitive and epistemic resources. It is also interesting to stress that in dealing with the exploitation of cognitive resources embedded in the environment, the notion of affordance, originally proposed by James J. Gibson to illustrate the hybrid character of visual perception, is relevant: abduction may also fruitfully describe all those human and animal hypothetical inferences that are operated through actions made up of smart manipulations to both detect „new“ affordances and to „create“ manufactured external objects that offer new affordances/cues.
Lorenzo Magnani, philosopher and cognitive scientist, is a professor at the University of Pavia, Italy, and the director of its Computational Philosophy Laboratory. He is visiting professor at the Sun Yat-sen University, Canton (Guangzhou), China. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at The City University of New York and currently directs international research programs in the EU, USA, and China.
Influential Books:
- Abduction, Reason, and Science (New York, 2001) has become a well-respected work in the field of human cognition. The recent book
- Morality in a Technological World (Cambridge, 2007) develops a philosophical and cognitive theory of the relationships between ethics and technology in a naturalistic perspective
- Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning has been published by Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York (2009)
- Understanding Violence. Morality, Religion, and Violence Intertwined: A Philosophical Stance has also been published by Springer in 2011.
1998: he started the series of International Conferences on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR).
Since 2011: he is the editor of the Book Series Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE), Springer, Heidelberg/Berlin.
Contact:
e-Mail: lmagnani@unipv.it
► Go top
Responsible for the maintenance of this page:
Press and Communication Services, presse@uv.uni-kiel.de