Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: the creative role of on-line manipulative abduction
- PDF / 181,823 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 185 Views
Scientific innovation as eco-epistemic warfare: the creative role of on-line manipulative abduction Lorenzo Magnani
Received: 2 May 2012 / Accepted: 22 January 2013 / Published online: 22 February 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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. Keywords Abduction Creativity Epistemic warfare Chance discovery Epistemic niches
1 The eco-cognitive situatedness of chance discovery and the role of abduction As defined by Oshawa and McBurney (2003), a chance is a new event or situation conveying both an opportunity and a risk in the future. Recently, a number of contributions have acknowledged the abductive dimension of seeking chances with relation to science (Magnani 2005, 2010; Magnani and Bardone 2008; Abe 2009). As maintained by Magnani and Bardone (2008) and Abe (2009), the process of L. Magnani (&) Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section, and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
123
50
L. Magnani
chance detection (and creation) is resulting from an inferential process—mainly abductive—in which the agent exploits latent clues and signs signaling or informing the presence of an action opportunity (Magnani and Bardone 2008). Accordingly, an inference is a form of sign activity in which the word sign encompasses several types of sign, for instance, symbol, feeling, image, conception, and other representation (Peirce 1931–1958, 5.283). Moreover, the process of inferring—and so the activity of chance seeking and extracting—is carried out in a distributed and hybrid way (Magnani 2010). This approach considers cognitive systems in terms of their environmental situatedness: instead of being used to build a comprehensive inner model of its surroundings, the agent’s perceptual capacities are seen as simply used to obtain ‘‘what-ever’’ specific pieces of information are necessary for its behavior in the world: not only the agent represents the external world but also modify it delegating representations to the environment to promote possible manipulatio
Data Loading...
