L. Magnani: Abductive cognition: the epistemological and eco-cognitive dimensions of hypothetical reasoning Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 2010, Cognitive Systems Monographs, Vol. 3, 536 p., 160,45€

摘要

Most academics have heard of deduction and induction, but much less familiar is the kind of inference that the American philosopher Charles Peirce called abduction. Abductive inference is the generation and evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, a kind of reasoning that is far more common and important than deductions, which rarely occur outside of mathematics, and inductions from examples to generalizations. Lorenzo Magnani has produced a magnum opus on abduction that brilliantly spans its philosophical, neuropsychological, computational, and ecological dimensions. In this review I will briefly highlight some of the substantial contributions of Abductive Cognition and raise a few objections to it. I finish by briefly discussing the relevance of abduction to concerns about mind and society.