Conjectures and manipulations: External representations in scientific reasoning

Mind and Society 3 (1):9-31 (2002)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

What I call theoretical abduction (sentential and model-based) 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 (preferred) explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanations 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, together with an analysis of the related notion of external representation . Finally, some examples of computational programs that simulate geometrical reasoning are illustrated. The computational embodiment generates a kind of squared epistemic mediator: geometrical construction, as an example of epistemic mediator, is further mediated

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-08-10

Downloads
32 (#431,738)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Lorenzo Magnani
Universita' degli Studi di Pavia

Citations of this work

How multiplayer online battle arenas foster scientific reasoning.Carlos Castaño Díaz - 2017 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München

Add more citations

References found in this work

Unified theories of cognition.Allen Newell - 1990 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
Conceptual Revolutions.Paul Thagard - 1992 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.

View all 28 references / Add more references