Abductive Cognition

More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, when working on logical and philosophical problems, suggested the concept of pragmatism (“pragmaticism”, in his own words) as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many authors have illustrated creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, many philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but they aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, obscure, and thus not analyzable.

In chapter three I have illustrated the main features of the so-called disembodiment of mind from the point of view of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations, where the problem of the continuous interaction between on-line and off-line intelligence can be properly addressed. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical contact with the externalized semiotic materiality already embedded in the artificialized environment. Hence, minds are “extended” and artificial in themselves. It is from this distributed perspective that I will further stress how abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc., but also kinesthetic experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The presence of kinesthetic aspects plainly demonstrates that abductive reasoning is basically manipulative. Again, both linguistic and non linguistic signs have an intrinsic semiotic life, as particular configurations of neural networks and chemical distributions (and in terms of their transformations) at the level of human brains, and as somatic expressions. However they can also be delegated to many external objects and devices, for example written texts, diagrams, artifacts, etc. We can also see, in this regard, how unconscious factors take part in the abductive procedure, which consequently acquires the character of a kind of “thinking through doing”.

As we have seen in the previous chapters, humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environment to lessen their limits. They create models, representations and other various mediating structures, that are thought to be aid for thinking. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on these design activities. In the first part of the chapter I will argue that these design activities are closely related to the process of niche construction. I will point out that in building various mediating structures, such as models or representations, humans alter the environment and thus create cognitive niches. In this sense, I argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays between individuals and the environment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing fleeting thoughts, private ideas, etc., into external supports. Cognitive niche constructionmay also contribute to making available a great portion of knowledge that would otherwise remain unexpressed or unreachable. This can in turn be useful in all those situations that require the transmission and sharing of knowledge, information and, more generally, of cognitive resources.

After having illustrated in the previous chapters the main features of my cognitive-epistemological analysis of abduction, it is necessary to further stress the dynamics involved in the interplay between internal and external representations in the case of logic. This will provide a tool for exploring the relationship between human and logical agents in section 7.1. First of all I will further develop my distinction between creative and mimetic artifacts. As I explained in chapter three these artifacts play the role of external objects (representations) active in what I have called disembodiment of mind. Mimetic external representations mirror concepts and problems that are already represented in the brain and need to be enhanced, solved, further complicated, etc. so they can sometimes creatively give rise to new concepts and meanings. From this perspective the expansion of the minds is, in the meantime, a continuous process of disembodiment of the minds themselves into the material world around them so that the evolution of the mind is inextricably linked with the evolution of many kinds of large, integrated, material cognitive systems. This chapter illustrates some features of this extraordinary interplay by focusing on the construction of logical cognitive systems and its consequences for abductive reasoning.