An abductive theory of scientific reasoning LORENZO MAGNANI Abstract More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher C. S. Peirce suggested the idea of pragmatism as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, philosophers have usually o¤ered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and then not analyzable. The ‘‘computational turn’’ gave us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. Artificial Intel- ligence and Cognitive Science tools allow us to test concepts and ideas pre- viously conceived in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual models that we find the central role of abduction in the explanation of cre- ative reasoning in science. What I call theoretical abduction (sentential and model-based) certainly illustrates much of what is important in abductive reasoning, especially the objective of selecting and creating a set of hypoth- eses that are able to dispense good (preferred) explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanation occurring in science or in ev- eryday reasoning when the exploitation of the environment is crucial. The concept of manipulative abduction is devoted to capture the role of action in many interesting situations: action provides otherwise unavailable infor- mation that enables the agent to solve problems by starting and performing a suitable abductive process of generation or selection of hypotheses. Many external things, usually inert from the epistemological point of view, can be transformed into what I call epistemic mediators, which are illustrated in the last part of the paper. Semiotica 153–1/4 (2005), 261–286 0037–1998/05/0153–0261 6 Walter de Gruyter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 (V7(M) 19/11/04 14:28) WDG/G J-1209 Semiotica, 153 PMU: WSL(W) 18/11 Times_M (0).3.04.05 (148Â225mm) pp. 261–286 016_P (p. 261)