Science is one of the most creative forms of human reasoning. The recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction as a means to originate and refine new ideas. Traditional cognitive science accounts concerning abduction aim at illustrating discovery and creativity processes in terms of theoretical and "internal" aspects, by means of computational simulations and/or abstract cognitive models. A neglected issue, worth of a deepest investigation inside artificial intelligence, is that "discovery" is often related to a complex cognitive task involving the use and the manipulation of external world. Concrete manipulations of external world is a fundamental passage in the process of knowledge extraction and hypotheses generation: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way, and so by creating implicit knowledge through doing. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery. This paper aims at illustrating the close relationship between external representations and creative processes in scientific explorations and understanding of phenomena.
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