Study On Abduction From A Cognitive Perspective

For Charles Sanders Peirce and the followers of his theory of abduction,abduction is another reasoning method beside deduction and induction,especially it is the only one among them that places a creative role in scientific discovery.Existing logical forms of abduction lose the cognitive attributes of abduction more or less,but such attributes are more prominent than the logical attributes of abduction.In addition,problem-solving theories do not view the abduction process from recognizing a problem to finding a solution as building a kind of relation like logical implication.Thus cognitive studies on abduction are of very high epistemological value for us to reveal the process of abductive reasoning,and can provide a possible interpretation by mental manipulation for the application of abduction in various fields.By presenting the process of formalization of abduction,this paper will attempt to reveal some difficulties of formal logic with the formalization of abduction,i.e.the tension between the safety of formal logic and the creativity of abduction,the tension between the abstractness of formal logic and the situatedness of abduction,and the tension between the static nature of formal logic and the dynamic nature of abduction.In respect of the above problems of formalization of abduction and the cognitive attributes of abduction including situatedness and satisfaction,this paper will try advancing a general interpretation of abductive reasoning from a cognitive perspective.According to the cognitive thesis on “model-based reasoning”,this paper will take abductive reasoning as a process of mental modelling involved in perception and semantics.This interpretation,to some extent,can mitigate the above three tensions for formal logic with the formalization of abduction.The process of mental manipulation of abductive reasoning can be interpreted as below: trigger(generalization and abstraction of explanandum),conjecture(search of schema),explanation(instantiation modelling)and modulation(model mapping and formation of a final or interim satisfactory explanation).Threupon this paper will further discuss the application of abductive reasoning to image modelling,analogy modelling and simulation modelling,and attempt to inspire the abductive reasoners in scientific practices.