The eco-cognitive model of abduction II

In the companion article “The eco-cognitive model of abduction” [66] I illustrated the main features of my eco-cognitive model of abduction (EC-Model). With the aim of delineating further aspects of that “naturalization of logic” recently urged by John Woods [94] I will now set out to further analyze some properties of abduction that are essential from a logical standpoint. When dealing with the so-called “inferential problem”, I will opt for the more general concepts of input and output instead of those of premisses and conclusions, and show that in this framework two consequences can be derived that help clarify basic logical aspects of abductive reasoning: 1) it is more natural to accept the “multimodal” and “context-dependent” character of the inferences involved, 2) inferences are not merely conceived of in the terms of the process leading to the “generation of an output” or to the proof of it, as in the traditional and standard view of deductive proofs, but rather, from this perspective abductive inferences can be seen as related to logical processes in which input and output fail to hold each other in an expected relation, with the solution involving the modification of inputs, not that of outputs. The chance of finding an abductive solution still appears to depend on the Aristotelian concept of “leading away” (ἀπαγωγή) I dealt with in the companion article, that is, on the starting of the application of a supplementary logic implementing an appropriate formal inference engine. An important result I will emphasize is that irrelevance and implausibility are not always offensive to reason. In addition, we cannot be sure, more broadly, that our guessed hypotheses are plausible (even if we know that looking – in advance – for plausibility is a human good and wise heuristic), indeed an implausible hypothesis can later on result plausible. In the last part of the article I will describe that if we wish to naturalize the logic of the abductive processes and its special consequence relation, we should refer to the following main aspects: “optimization of situatedness”, “maximization of changeability” of both input and output, and high “information-sensitiveness”. Furthermore, I will point out that a logic of abduction must acknowledge the importance of keeping record of the “past life” of abductive inferential praxes, contrarily to the fact that traditional demonstrative ideal systems are prototypically characterized by what I call “maximization of memorylessness”.