Theoretical and manipulative abduction conjectures and manipulations : the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery. -- Non-explanatory and instrumental abduction : plausibility, implausibility, ignorance preservation. -- Semiotic brains and artificial minds : how brains make up material cognitive systems. -- Neuromultimodal abduction : pre-wired brains, embidiment, neurospaces. -- Animal abduction : from mindless organisms to srtifactual mediators. -- Abduction, affordances, and cognitive niches : sharing representations and creating chances through cognitive niche construction. -- Abduction in human and logical agents : hasty (...) generalizers, hybrid abducers, fallacies. -- Morphodynamical abduction : causation of hypotheses by attractors dynamics. (shrink)

Locked and unlocked strategies are at the center of this article, as ways of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines. The character and the role of these cognitive strategies, which are occurring both in humans and in computational machines, is indeed strictly related to the generation of cognitive outputs, which range from weak to strong level of knowledge creativity. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational AI programs, such as (...) AlphaGo, which aim at performing various kinds of abductive hypothetical reasoning. In these cases, the programs are characterized by _locked_ abductive strategies: they deal with weak (even if sometimes amazing) kinds of hypothetical creative reasoning, because they are limited in what I call eco-cognitive openness, which instead qualifies human cognizers who are performing higher kinds of abductive creative reasoning, where cognitive strategies are instead _unlocked_. (shrink)

This handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. It highlights the role of models as mediators between theory and experimentation, and as educational devices, as well as their relevance in testing hypotheses and explanatory functions. The Springer Handbook merges philosophical, cognitive and epistemological perspectives on models with the more practical needs related to the application of this tool across various disciplines and practices. The result is a unique, reliable source of information that guides (...) readers toward an understanding of different aspects of model-based science, such as the theoretical and cognitive nature of models, as well as their practical and logical aspects. The inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity once they are constructed, adopted, and manipulated for different scientific and technological purposes is also discussed. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, the history of science, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive and computer science, physics and life sciences, as well as engineering, architecture, and economics, this Handbook uses numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations to promote a better understanding of the concepts. This also makes it highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds. All in all, the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science represents the definitive application-oriented reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. (shrink)

The book Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery, aims to explain how specific modeling practices employed by scientists are productive methods of ...

The technological advances of contemporary society have outpaced our moral understanding of the problems that they create. How will we deal with profound ecological changes, human cloning, hybrid people, and eroding cyberprivacy, just to name a few issues? In this book, Lorenzo Magnani argues that existing moral constructs often cannot be applied to new technology. He proposes an entirely different ethical approach, one that blends epistemology with cognitive science. The resulting moral strategy promises renewed dignity for overlooked populations, both (...) of today and of the future. (shrink)

There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term ‘model’ comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book’s contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

This book employs a new eco-cognitive model of abduction to underline the distributed and embodied nature of scientific cognition. Its main focus is on the knowledge-enhancing virtues of abduction and on the productive role of scientific models. What are the distinctive features that define the kind of knowledge produced by science? To provide an answer to this question, the book first addresses the ideas of Aristotle, who stressed the essential inferential and distributed role of external cognitive tools and epistemic mediators (...) in abductive cognition. This is analyzed in depth from both a naturalized logic and an ecology of cognition perspective. It is shown how the maximization of cognition, and of abducibility – two typical goals of science – are related to a number of fundamental aspects: the optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness; the maximization of changeability for both the input and the output of the inferences involved; a high degree of information-sensitiveness; and the need to record the “past life” of abductive inferential practices. Lastly, the book explains how some impoverished epistemological niches – the result of a growing epistemic irresponsibility associated with the commodification and commercialization of science – are now seriously jeopardizing the flourishing development of human creative abduction. (shrink)

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our (...) analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews. (shrink)

Here we describe how writing exercises based on Value Analysis Design, an approach to the design and implementation of technological systems, can build skills in both philosophical reflection and philosophical writing. While not a replacement for long-form philosophical writing, these exercises are ways to help students develop both philosophical and writing skills. Not only do they do so without requiring the extensive feedback that is required for long-form writing, but they are also opportunities for STEM students and other non-philosophy majors (...) to acquire skills in ethical reflection, analysis, and communication. (shrink)

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. It includes revised contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR’015), held on June 25-27 in Sestri Levante, Italy. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which focuses on models, reasoning and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, addressing issues concerning (...) information visualization, experimental methods and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving and reasoning. The respective contributions analyze different types of reasoning, discussing various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of historical, epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies in experimental research, this part aims at fostering new discussions and stimulating new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the field of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of current theories and applications of model-based reasoning. (shrink)

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. To illustrate this (...) process I will take advantage of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical interactions with the externalized semiotic materiality suitably stocked in the environment. Hence, minds are material, “extended” and artificial in themselves. A considerable part of human abductive thinking is occurring through an activity consisting in a kind of reification in the external environment and a subsequent re-projection and reinterpretation through new configurations of neural networks and chemical processes. I also illustrate how this activity takes advantage of hybrid representations and how it can nicely account for various processes of creative and selective abduction, bringing up the question of how multimodal aspects involving a full range of sensory modalities are important in hypothetical reasoning. (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 volume sets out to give a philosophical "applied" account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, ...

The naturalization of logic aims at a revision of mainstream logic. In this article, I contend it is an urgent task to be completed. This new project will permit a new collaboration between logic and cognitive science. This can be accomplished doing for logic what many decades ago Quine and other philosophers undertook in the case of epistemology. First of all, this article analyzes how the naturalization can be achieved thanks to some insights provided by the recent John Woods’ book (...) Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference; important concepts that regard a naturalized logic are synthetically analyzed: errors, paradigm creep, third-way reasoning, consequence-having and consequence drawing, agent based reasoning. The article also takes advantage of my own studies, which are aimed both at exculpating the negative fallacious character of abduction and at illustrating the EC-model of it, I have recently proposed. Aiming at encouraging the project of naturalization of logic, the article specifically recommends the increase of logical research on abduction, and emphasizes how current philosophical and logical research on human inferences is indebted towards Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher whose importance and modernity are too often underestimated. The final part of the article will introduce an analysis of the importance of the so-called optimization of situatedness, a concept that is necessary to understand that maximization of “abducibility”, which characterizes modern science. (shrink)

The central focus of this research is the fast and crucial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its exceptionally serious consequences in terms of healthcare, state intervention and impositions, radical changes in people’s life, on a crucial psychological, relational, and political construct: trust. In this survey, addressed to 4260 Italian citizens, we tried to analyze and measure such impact, focusing on various aspects of trust. This attention to multiple dimensions of trust constitutes the key conceptual advantage of this research, since (...) trust is a complex and layered construct, with its own internal dynamics. In particular, the analysis focuses on how citizens attribute trust to Public Authorities, in relation to the management of the health crisis: with regard to the measures and guidelines adopted, the purposes pursued, the motivations that determine them, their capacity for involvement and their effectiveness for the containment of the virus itself. A pandemic creates a bilateral need for trust, both in Public Authorities (they have to rely on citizens’ compliance, and must try to promote and maintain their trust in order to be effective), and in citizens, since they need to feel that somebody can do something, can (has the power) to protect them, to act at the needed collective level. We are interested to explore how this need for trust affects the attributional process, regarding both attitudes and the corresponding decisions and actions. The most striking result of this survey is the very high level of institutional trust expressed by respondents: 75% of them trust Italian public authorities to be able to deal with the COVID-19 emergency. This is in sharp contrast with the relatively low levels of institutional trust characteristic of Italy, both historically and in recent surveys. Moreover, the survey allowed to discriminate several potential predictors for trust, thus emphasizing factors that, during this crisis, are exhibiting an anomalous impact on trust. (shrink)

Una raccolta di riflessioni originali sul rapporto tra la scienza e la nostra società, a partire dal pensiero del grande fisico e intellettuale Carlo Bernardini.

First of all I would like to describe inductive and abductive reasoning in the light of the agent–based framework to the aim of clarifying their fallacious character and the role of the so-called ideal systems (logical and computational). Then I will analyze some inductive and abductive types of reasoning that in the perspective of classical and informal logic are defined fallacies. I will describe how in an agent-based reasoning this kind of fallacious reasoning can in some cases be redefined and (...) considered as a good way of reasoning. Finally, I will illustrate how what I call manipulative abduction can be interpreted as a form of practical reasoning a better understanding of which can furnish a description of human beings as hybrid reasoners in so far they are users of ideal and computational agents. (shrink)

More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and thus (...) not analyzable. The “computational turn” gave us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science tools allow us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual models that we find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. What I call theoretical abduction certainly illustrates much of what is important in abductive reasoning, especially the objective of selecting and creating a set of hypotheses that are able to dispense good explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanation occurring in science or in everyday reasoning when the exploitation of the environment is crucial. The concept of manipulative abduction is devoted to capture the role of action in many interesting situations: action provides otherwise unavailable information that enables the agent to solve problems by starting and performing a suitable abductive process of generation or selection of hypotheses. Many external things, usually inert from the epistemological point of view, can be transformed into what I call epistemic mediators, which are illustrated in the last part of the paper. (shrink)

This book contains contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR'012), held on June 21-23 in Sestri Levante, Italy. Interdisciplinary researchers discuss in this volume how scientific cognition and other kinds of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. Some of the contributions analyzed the problem of model-based reasoning in technology and stressed the issues of scientific and technological innovation. The book is divided in (...) three main parts: models, mental models, representations; abduction, problem solving and practical reasoning; historical, epistemological and technological issues.. (shrink)

_Locked_ and _unlocked_ strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational deep learning programs, such as AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which are able to realize various types of abductive hypothetical reasoning. These programs embed what I call locked abductive strategies, so, (...) even if they present spectacular performances for example in games, they are characterized by poor types of hypothetical creative cognition insofar as they are constrained in what I call _eco-cognitive openness_. This openness instead characterizes unlocked human cognition that pertains to higher kinds of abductive reasoning, in both the creative and diagnostic cases, in which cognitive strategies are instead unlocked. This special kind of “openness” is physically rooted in the fundamental character of the human brain as an open system constantly coupled with the environment (that is, an “open” or “dissipative” system): its activity is the uninterrupted attempt to achieve the equilibrium with the environment in which it is embedded, and this interplay can never be switched off without producing severe damage to the brain. The brain cannot be conceived as deprived of its physical quintessence that is its openness. In the brain, contrary to the computational case, ordering is not derived from the outside thanks to what I have called in a recent book “computational domestication of ignorant entities”, but it is the direct product of an “internal” open dynamical process of the system. (shrink)

In this paper I engage with the notion that Covid-19 can be seen as the ‘great equalizer’, in virtue of the widespread sense of uncertainty it has caused and the fact that it has forced us to recognize our shared human fragility. Against the view that Covid-19 is the ‘great equalizer’, I argue that, on the contrary, the pandemic reflects existing vulnerabilities and, in many cases, exacerbates them. I do so by offering first a definition of both ontological and relational (...) vulnerability and discussing some important ethical and political dimensions of vulnerability in conditions of uncertainty. I then claim that understanding vulnerability in both ontological and relational terms allows us to see the differential impact of the pandemic on differently situated individuals. More specifically, I argue that vulnerability in conditions of uncertainty can threaten individuals’ sense of self, and thus their autonomy – both understood in relational terms. I consider what kind of response human vulnerability in times of crisis calls for. In particular, I maintain that a promising way to counteract uncertainty would be to adopt a solidaristic approach to public health, based on an understanding of solidarity as a relational concept. In other words, I argue that it is through solidarity that individuals’ vulnerabilities can be mitigated, and their autonomy promoted, even during the most uncertain times. I finally discuss two objections that could be raised against the solidaristic approach defended in my paper. First, the approach may fail to find the support of individuals who are unwilling to care for others when their own interests are under threat. Second, there might be those who deny that the virus constitutes a serious enough threat to warrant or justify the restrictions on individual freedoms imposed by governments in the name of solidarity. I conclude by arguing that while a commitment to solidarity can be easily undermined by scepticism towards political and other authorities, and by the failures of those authorities themselves, it is paramount that societies strive for it as the best means to preserve individuals’ health, autonomy, and well-being. (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)

This volume is a collection of papers that explore various areas of common interest between philosophy, computing, and cognition. The book illustrates the rich intrigue of this fascinating recent intellectual story. It begins by providing a new analysis of the ideas related to computer ethics, such as the role in information technology of the so-called moral mediators, the relationship between intelligent machines and warfare, and the new opportunities offered by telepresnece, for example in teaching and learning. The book also ties (...) together the concerns of epistemology and logic, showing, for example, the connections between computers, bio-robotics, and scientific research and between computational programs and scientific discovery. Important results coming from recent computational models of deduction, the dynamic nature of meaning, and the role of reasoning and learning in spatial, visual and exemplar-based compuational frameworks are also addressed. Some stimulating papers carefully study how the interplay between computing and philosophy has also shed new light on the role of rational acceptance in the logic of belief and on the status of old philosophical topics like embodiment and consciousness, the role of information and the problem of realism in the new digital world. Finally, a considerable part of the book addresses the role of intenal and external representations in scientific reasoning and creative inferences as well as the place of manipulation of objects and artifacts in human cognition. Taking these topics together this book describes an aspect of an emerging agenda which is likely to carry the interaction between philosophy, cognition and computing forward into the twenty-first century. The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the International European Conference Computing and Philosophy, E-CAP2004, Italy, held at the University of Paiva, Paiv, Italy in June 2004, chaired by Lorenzo Magnani. (shrink)