Abduction and chance discovery in science

Issue title: Chance discovery

Guest editors: A. Abex and Y. Ohsaway

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Magnani, Lorenzo^{a; b}

Affiliations: [a] Department of Philosophy and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy | [b] Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Philosophy, 510275 Guangzhou (Canton), P.R. China. E-mail: lmagnani@unipv.it | [x] ATR Knowledge Science Laboratories, Japan | [y] School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Abstract: First of all I will illustrate in this paper that some typical internal abductive processes are involved in chance discovery and production (for example through radical innovations). Nevertheless, especially concrete manipulations of the external world constitute a fundamental passage in chance discovery: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses (epistemic mediators) for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way. In this manner it is possible to create implicit knowledge through doing and to produce various opportunity to find, for example, anomalies and fruitful new risky perspectives. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery. The paper describes some of the “templates” of manipulative behavior which account for the most common cognitive and epistemic acting related to chance discovery and chance production.

DOI: 10.3233/KES-2007-11503

Journal: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 273-279, 2007