Epistemic Mediators and Manipulative Abduction in Model-Based Reasoning

Science expresses one of the most creative forms of human reasoning. It has been stressed that scientific discovery is a mysterious process, involving irrationality and any kind of “unexplainable ” feelings and emotions. By rejecting that point of view, the recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction, as a ra-tional means to originate and refine new ideas. I maintain that abduction is the process of “inferring” certain facts and/or laws and hypotheses that render some sentences plausible, that “explain ” or “discover ” some (eventually new) phenomenon or observation; it is the proc-ess of reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated. In (Magnani, 2001a) I have intro-duced the concept of theoretical abduction, as a form of internal processing. There are two kinds of theoretical ab