Abduction in Context

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.-2 On Classifying Abduction.-3 On Lorenzo Magnani's Manipulative Abduction.-4 Peirce and Magnani on Geometrical Diagrams.-5 Abduction and Estimation in Animals.-6 On Animal Cognition: before and after the Beast-Machine Controversy.-7 How to Learn Abduction from Animals?: From Avicenna to Magnani.-8 From Visual Abduction to Abductive Vision.-9 Misrepresentation in Context [Woosuk Park, (2014), Misrepresentation in Context, Foundations of Science, 19 (4), 363-374.].-10. A Dilemma for Situation Semanticists.-11 Towards a Caricature Model of Science.-12 Belief Revision Vs. Conceptual Change in Mathematics.-13 Ad hoc Hypothesis Generation as Enthymeme Resolution.-14 Conclusion.