Lorenzo Magnani

The technological advances of contemporary society have outpaced our moral understanding of the problems that they create. How will we deal with profound ecological changes, human cloning, hybrid people, and eroding cyberprivacy, just to name a few issues? In this book, Lorenzo Magnani argues that existing moral constructs often cannot be applied to new technology. He proposes an entirely different ethical approach, one that blends epistemology with cognitive science. The resulting moral strategy promises renewed dignity for overlooked populations, both of today and of the future.

Cyber-bullying, and other issues related to violence being committed online in prosocial environments, are beginning to constitute an emergency worldwide. Institutions are particularly sensitive to the problem especially as far as teenagers are concerned inasmuch as, in cases of inter-teen episodes, the deterrent power of ordinary justice is not as effective as it is between adults. In order to develop the most suitable policies, institution should not be satisfied with statistics and sociological perspectives on the phenomenon, but rather seek a deep ethical understanding—also referring to the biological and evolutionary past of human beings. The aim of this paper is to show a way to fill this theoretical gap, offering some answers that can illuminate future policy-oriented research and reflection. In order to do so, we will start by connecting our argument to evolutionary studies carried out in the past two decades, focusing on gossip as a tool for social assortment, thus endowed with a dual function: protect the group from free riders, intruders and bullies but also bully the deviant members. In the “Mediating gossip through social networks” section, we will see which aspects of gossip, vital for bullying, are co-opted by social network scenarios. A fundamental trait of human social life, that is the subdivision in smaller coalitions, or sub-groups, will be shown as missing in social networks dynamics—therefore constituting themselves as structurally violent. The “Why and how do social networks empower bullying?” section will deal with techno-ethical and epistemological concerns regarding how gossip, mediated by SN, manages to empower cyber-bullying. The “Self-gossip and self-mobbing in the light of the disruption of sub-moralities” section will characterize cyber-bullying as often sparked by self-gossip in a scenario where familiar sub-groups, which also mediate defense and mutual understanding, are disrupted. The “Discussion and conclusion” section will consist of a philosophical summary, divided in two parts: a pars destruens analyzing whether SN, in their actual configurations, are fit for being used by humans-like-us, and a pars construens examining the broad potential consequences of highly enforced regulation aimed at contrasting cyber-bullying.

In this paper I contend that abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc. but also kinesthetic experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The kinesthetic aspects simply explain abductive reasoning is basically manipulative, both linguistic and non linguistic signs have an internal semiotic life, as particular configurations of neural networks and chemical distributions (and in terms of their transformations) at the level of human brains, and as somatic expressions, but can also be delegated to many external objects and devices, for example written texts, diagrams, artifacts, etc. Still in this case unconscious aspects takepart of the abductive procedure, which acquires the features of a kind of "thinking through doing".

Theoretical and manipulative abduction conjectures and manipulations : the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery. -- Non-explanatory and instrumental abduction : plausibility, implausibility, ignorance preservation. -- Semiotic brains and artificial minds : how brains make up material cognitive systems. -- Neuromultimodal abduction : pre-wired brains, embidiment, neurospaces. -- Animal abduction : from mindless organisms to srtifactual mediators. -- Abduction, affordances, and cognitive niches : sharing representations and creating chances through cognitive niche construction. -- Abduction in human and logical agents : hasty generalizers, hybrid abducers, fallacies. -- Morphodynamical abduction : causation of hypotheses by attractors dynamics.

Philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of describing hypotheses generation, but all aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, illusory or obscure, and then not analysable. Those descriptions are often so far from Peircian pragmatic prescription and so abstract to result completely unknowable and obscure. The “computational turn” gives us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. In fact, by exploiting artificial intelligence and cognitive science tools, computational philosophy allows us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived only in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual computational models that I find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. Creativity and discovery are no more seen as a mysterious irrational process, but, thanks to constructive accounts, as a complex relationship among different inferential steps that can be clearly analysed and identified. I maintain that the computational philosophy analysis of model-based and manipulative abduction and of external and epistemic mediators is important not only to delineate the actual practice of abduction, but also to further enhance the development of programs computationally adequate in rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, for example, scientific hypotheses or mathematical theorems

There has been little research into the weak kindsof negating hypotheses. Hypotheses may be unfalsifiable. In this case it is impossible tofind a contradiction in some area of the conceptualsystems in which they are incorporated.Notwithstanding this fact, it is sometimes necessaryto construct ways of rejecting the unfalsifiablehypothesis at hand by resorting to some external forms of negation, external because wewant to avoid any arbitrary and subjectiveelimination, which would be rationally orepistemologically unjustified. I will consider akind of ``weak'''' (unfalsifiable) hypotheses that arehard to negate and the ways for making it easy. Inthese cases the subject can ``rationally'''' decide towithdraw his hypotheses even in contexts where it is``impossible'''' to find ``explicit'''' contradictions: theuse of negation as failure (an interestingtechnique for negating hypotheses and accessing newones suggested by artificial intelligence) isilluminating. I plan to explore whether this kind ofnegation can be employed to model hypothesiswithdrawal in Poincaré''s conventionalism of theprinciples of physics and in Freudian analyticreasoning.

Technology moves us to a better world. We contend that through technology people can simplify and solve moral tasks when they are in presence of incomplete information and possess a diminished capacity to act morally. Many external things, usually inert from the moral point of view, can be transformed into the so-called moral mediators. Hence, not all of the moral tools are inside the head, many of them are shared and distributed in “external” objects and structures which function as ethical devices.

The study of creative, diagnostic, visual, spatial, analogical, and temporal reasoning has demonstrated that there are many ways of performing intelligent and creative reasoning that cannot be described with the help only of traditional notions of reasoning such as classical logic. Understanding the contribution of modeling practices to discovery and conceptual change in science requires expanding scientific reasoning to include complex forms of creative reasoning that are not always successful and can lead to incorrect solutions. The study of these heuristic ways of reasoning is situated at the crossroads of philosophy, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and logic; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning. The term "model" comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations. The models are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. Moreover, in the modeling process, various forms of abstraction are used. Evaluation and adaptation take place in light of structural, causal, and/or functional constraints. Model simulation can be used to produce new states and enable evaluation of behaviors and other factors. Several of the papers in this volume aim at increasing epistemological knowledge about the role of model-based reasoning in various scientific tasks, other papers address fundamental cognitive issues related to model-based reasoning and illustrate novel analyses of cognitive "logical" models of model-based reasoning and of the interplay abduction/model-based reasoning/creative inferences. The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the International Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering: Abduction, Visualization, Simulation, held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 2004.

The aim of this article is to offer a non-trivial reflection about the violence embedded in self-sacrifice. Firstly, we will suggest a definition of violence which does not make self-sacrifice necessarily violent, but rather aims at being consistent with the common sense conception of sacrifice as actually violent. Framing this initial claim within the vectorial conception of sacrifice offered by Derrida, we will individuate in the violence against intellect the core of the violent dimension of self-sacrifice, insofar as the author of the sacrifice does not limitedly commit part of her understanding in the sacrificial practice, but all of it, since she is both the agent and the patient of sacrifice. At this point, we will have gathered enough material to spell out two fundamental violent aspects of self-sacrifice. The first concerns the exemplar of self-sacrifice in Western tradition, that is, Jesus Christ’s. The self-sacrifice committed by God’s own lógos is the epitome of sacrifice as sacrificium intellectus, therefore the highest gradient of intellectual violence. At the same time, this is crucial as it further corroborates the interpretation of Jesus’ sacrifice as the last sacrifice: no mimetic attempt to reenact His sacrifice can hold the comparison under the fundamental aspect of intellectual violence. The second “mirror” to reflect about the violence of self-sacrifice will concern the sacrifice enacted by superheroes, namely Batman, and the extent to which the sacrifice of intellect is at play when kenotic self-sacrifice and scapegoating processes become hard to tell one from the other.

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 hypotheses that are able to dispense good (preferred) explanations of data, but fails to account for many cases of explanation occurring in science or in everyday 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 information 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, together with an analysis of the related notions of ``perceptual and inceptual rehearsal'' and of ``external representation''.

In this paper we show how some reasoning, though fallacious, can appear to be attractive and useful for beings-like-us. Although they do not provide conclusive evidence to support or reject a certain claim the way scientific statements do, they tell us something interesting about how humans build up their arguments and reasons. First of all, we will consider and investigate three main types of fallacies: argumentum ad hominem , argumentum ad verecundiam , and argumentum ad populum . These three fallacies are traditionally considered as examples of a broader category called ignoratio elenchi. Secondly, we show how people who commit these fallacies rely on information about other human beings in their reasoning. That is, they do not follow certain logical procedures that eventually lead them to correct conclusions. But they simply make use of others as social characters. For example, being an authority, being an expert, being part of a class, etc., become the substitutes for more direct evidence to support a certain claim or to make an argument more appealing

In her book Abductive Reasoning Atocha Aliseda (2006) stresses the attention to the logical models of abduction, centering on the semantic tableaux as a method for extending and improving both the whole cognitive/philosophical view on it and on other more restricted logical approaches. I will provide further insight on two aspects. The first is re-lated to the importance of increasing logical knowledge on abduction: Aliseda clearly shows how the logical study on abduction in turn helps us to extend and modernize the classical and received idea of logic. The second refers to some ideas coming from the so-called distributed cognition and concerns the role of logical models as forms of cognitive exter-nalizations of preexistent in-formal human reasoning performances. The logical externalization in objective systems, communicable and sharable, is able to grant stable perspectives endowed with symbolic, abstract, and rigorous cogni-tive features. I will also emphasize that Aliseda especially stresses that this character of stability and objectivity of logical achievements are not usually present in models of abduction that are merely cognitive and epistemological, and of ex-treme importance from the computational point of view

First of all I would like to describe inductive and abductive reasoning in the light of the agent–based framework to the aim of clarifying their fallacious character and the role of the so-called ideal systems (logical and computational). Then I will analyze some inductive and abductive types of reasoning that in the perspective of classical and informal logic are defined fallacies. I will describe how in an agent-based reasoning this kind of fallacious reasoning can in some cases be redefined and considered as a good way of reasoning. Finally, I will illustrate how what I call manipulative abduction can be interpreted as a form of practical reasoning a better understanding of which can furnish a description of human beings as hybrid reasoners in so far they are users of ideal and computational agents.