Manipulative Abduction
The problem of the incommensurability of meaning has distracted the epistemologists from the procedural, extra-sentential and extra-theoretical aspects of scientific practice. Since Kuhn, the problem of translating between languages and of conceptual crea
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MANIPULATIVE ABDUCTION IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
The problem of the incommensurability of meaning has distracted the epistemologists from the procedural, extra-sentential and extra-theoretical aspects of scientific practice. Since Kuhn, the problem of translating between languages and of conceptual creativity has dominated the theory of meaning . Manipulative abduction (Figure 1) happens when we are thinking through doing and not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing. So the idea of manipulative abduction goes beyond the well-known role of experiments as capable of forming new scientific laws by means of the results (the nature's answers to the investigator's question) they present, or of merely playing a predictive role (in confirmation and in falsification) . Manipulative abduction refers to an extra-theoretical behavior that aims at creating communicable accounts of new experiences to integrate them into previously existing systems of experimental and linguistic (theoretical) practices . The existence of this kind of extra-theoretical cognitive behavior is also testified by the many everyday situations in which humans are perfectly able to perform very efficacious (and habitual) tasks without the immediate possibility of realizing their conceptual explanation . In some cases the conceptual account for doing these things was at one point present in the memory, but now has deteriorated, and it is necessary to reproduce it, in other cases the account has to be constructed for the first time, like in creative settings of manipulative abduction in science. Hutchins (1995) illustrates the case of a navigation instructor that for 3 years performed an automatized task involv53 L. Magnani, Abduction, Reason and Science © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2001
Abduction, Reason, and Science
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ing a complicated set of plotting manipulations and procedures. The insight concerning the conceptual relationships between relative and geographic motion came to him suddenly "as lay in his bunk one night" . This example explains that many forms of learning can be represented as the result of the capability of giving conceptual and theoretical details to already automatized manipulative executions. The instructor does not discover anything new from the point of view of the objective knowledge about the involved skill, however, we can say that his conceptual awareness is new from the local perspective of his individuality. In this kind of action -based abduction the suggested hypotheses are inherently ambiguous until articulated into configurations of real or imaginated entities (images, models or concrete apparatus and instruments). In these cases only by experimenting we can discriminate between possibilities: they are articulated behaviorally and concretely by manipulations and then, increasingly, by words and pictures. Gooding (1990) refers to this kind of concrete manipulative reasoning when he illustrates the role in science of the so-called "construals" that embody tacit inferences in procedures involving visu
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