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Mind & Society

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01.06.2013

Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: the creative role of on-line manipulative abduction

verfasst von: Lorenzo Magnani

Erschienen in: Mind & Society | Ausgabe 1/2013

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Abstract

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 thought to be good to think. The case of scientific innovation is particularly important: the main aim of this paper is to revise and criticize the concept of scientific innovation, reframing it in what I will call an eco-epistemic perspective, taking advantage of recent results coming from the area of distributed cognition (common coding) and abductive cognition (manipulative). Taking advantage of this eco-cognitive perspective the article outlines how innovative scientific modeling activity can be better described taking advantage of the concept of “epistemic warfare”, which sees scientific enterprise as a complicated struggle for rational knowledge in which it is crucial to distinguish epistemic (for example scientific models) from non epistemic (for example fictions, falsities, propaganda) weapons.

Vorheriger Artikel The creative industry of integrative systems biology

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Representational delegations are those cognitive acts that transform the natural environment in a cognitive one.

We have to note that manipulative abduction (cf. below in this article) also happens when we are thinking through doing (and not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing). This kind of action-based cognition can hardly be intended as performed through completely intentional and/or conscious acts (Magnani 2009).

On the cognitive delegations to external artifacts see (Magnani 2009, chapter three, Section 3.6). A useful description of how formats also matter in the case of external hypothetical models and representations, and of how they provide different affordances and inferential chances, cf. Vorms (Vorms 2010).

The complicated analysis of some seminal Peircean philosophical considerations concerning abduction, perception, inference, and instinct, which have to be considered still important to current cognitive and epistemological research, is provided in (Magnani 2009, chapter five).

On the puzzling problem of the “modal” and “amodal” character of the human brain processing of perceptual information, and the asseveration of the importance of grounded cognition, cf. (Barsalou 2008a, b).

“The basic argument for common coding is an adaptive one, where organisms are considered to be fundamentally action systems. In this view, sensory and cognitive systems evolved to support action, and they are therefore dynamically coupled to action systems in ways that help organisms act quickly and appropriately. Common coding, and the resultant replication of external movements in body coordinates, provides one form of highly efficient coupling. Since both biological and nonbiological movements are equally important to the organism, and the two movements interact in unpredictable ways, it is beneficial to replicate both types of movements in body coordinates, so that efficient responses can be generated” (Chandrasekharan 2009, p. 1069): in this quoted paper the reader can find a rich reference to the recent literature on embodied cognition and common coding.

I contend that the so-called abstract model can be better described in terms of what Nersessian and Chandrasekharan (2009) call manifest model: when the scientific collective decides whether the model is worth pursuing, and whether it would address the problems and concepts researchers are faced with, it is an internal model and it is manifest because it is shared and “[...] allows group members to perform manipulations and thus form common movement representations of the proposed concept. The manifest model also improves group dynamics” (Chandrasekharan 2009, p. 1079).

On the concept of multimodal abduction see (Thagard 2007).

Written natural languages are intertwined with iconic aspects too. Stjernfelt (2007) provides a full analysis of the role of icons and diagrams in Peircean philosophical and semiotic approach, also taking into account the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.

It is from this perspective that [sentential] syllogism and [model-based] perception are seen as rigorously intertwined. Consequently, there is no sharp contrast between the idea of cognition as perception and the idea of cognition as something that pertains to logic. Both aspects are inferential in themselves and fruit of sign activity. Taking the Peircean philosophical path we return to observations Thagard stressed when speaking of the case of abduction: cognition is basically multimodal (2007).

To confront critiques and suspects about the legitimacy of the new number dx, Leibniz prudently conceded that dx can be considered a fiction, but a “well founded” one. The birth of non-standard analysis, an “alternative calculus” invented by Abraham Robinson (1966), based on infinitesimal numbers in the spirit of Leibniz’s method, revealed that infinitesimals are not at all fictions, through an extension of the real numbers system \(\mathbb{R}\) to the system \(\mathbb{R}^*\) containing infinitesimals smaller in the absolute value than any positive real number.

This theory has been proposed by Callon, Latour himself, and Law (Callon 1994, 1997; Latour 1987, 1988; Callon and Latour 1992; Law 1993).

The characteristic feature of epistemic weapons is that they are value-directed to the aim of promoting the attainment of scientific truth, for example through predictive and empirical accuracy, simplicity, testability, consistency, etc.: in this perspective I basically agree with the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values as limpidly depicted in (Steel 2010).

On the related problem of resemblance (similarity, isomorphism, homomorphism, etc.) in scientific modeling see (Magnani 2012).

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Titel: Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: the creative role of on-line manipulative abduction
verfasst von: Lorenzo Magnani
Publikationsdatum: 01.06.2013
Verlag: Springer-Verlag
Erschienen in: Mind & Society / Ausgabe 1/2013
Print ISSN: 1593-7879
Elektronische ISSN: 1860-1839
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-013-0118-4

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