Cristina Barés Gómez

What is the role played by mechanisms in medical reasoning? In this paper, we provide an inferential study of the use of mechanisms in medical reasoning. Medical reasoning includes clinical reasoning and biomedical research reasoning. It is not conceived in terms of a specific form of inference, but as a complex form of reasoning involving abductions, deductions, and inductions. This methodology sheds a new light on the notion of mechanistic evidence, which has been the object of a regain of interest in recent literature, but which remains unclearly defined. We claim that “mechanistic evidence” is ambiguous: it can mean “evidence of a mechanism” or “mechanism as evidence”. Then, two main groups of medical reasoning can be identified: inference _to_ mechanisms and inference _from_ mechanisms. This serves as a basis to distinguish between factual evidence and the more pragmatic notion of evidence as reasons to accept a claim. In this context, we assess the role of mechanisms in the process of producing evidence.

The aim of this article is to analyse the kind of inference used in the reconstruction of proto-languages. Hypothesis is at the core of this reconstruction process and this, together with the structure of reasoning involved, indicates abductive reasoning. We analyse abductive reasoning, and specify its nuances and particularities. The novelty we introduce is the importance of context as we focus on a form of abduction that goes beyond the context in which the scientific work is being developed by incorporating contexts from other sciences. Therefore, an intercontextual chain of inference can be part of abductive reasoning processes and the resulting hypothesis remains provisional. Several disciplines, such as archaeology, history and linguistics, play a cognitive role in the reconstruction of proto-languages, thus requiring more than one context. We use the case of the reconstruction of proto-Semitic and the unexpected fact of the Ugarit and Ebla discoveries (plus Amorite names). This sample may shed light on the use of abduction to explain certain scientific practices.

The present study focuses on a grammatical category called evidentiality. The primary meaning of evidentiality is concerned with information source. That is, it expresses whether something has been seen, heard or inferred. The aim here is to conduct a conceptual study of evidentiality in which use is made of formal tools. The fundamental intuition is that the distinction between ‘evidence’as ‘proof’and ‘evidentiality’as ‘to do with proof’is a crucial one. Evidentiality is a dynamic notion to be analysed through the use of knowledge by the agents, a knowledge in action, which involves an in-coming state and an out-coming state that is typical of the transmission of information. We propose our own approach in which the dynamics of knowledge in action is grasped in the context of a dynamic epistemic logic.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important and innovative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning, held on October 24–26 2018 in Seville, Spain, the book is divided into three main parts. The first focuses on models, reasoning, and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, and addresses issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods, and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving, and reasoning. The respective papers assess different types of reasoning, and discuss various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies, this part is intended to foster new discussions and stimulate new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the fields of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of the latest theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

Mirativity is a grammatical category or a linguistic strategy that makes explicit the surprising aspect of a piece of information. Different mirativity strategies appear in different languages. Evidentiality is a grammatical category that explicitly expresses the source of information, i.e. if something has been seen, heard or inferred. Whether mirativity forms part of evidentiality is an open question. An agent makes use of a mirativity marker when she or he expresses something about a surprising fact with respect to her or his background knowledge. But there are different kinds of mirativity markers. Some of them are simple and direct and others, more complex, involve inferential processes. Here, we focus on complex mirativity and we compare it with inferred evidentials and deferred realizations. Our proposal goes beyond the purely linguistic analysis, since we try to interpret mirativity, and its role in interaction, as forming part of or involving a particular kind of inference, namely abduction. Mirativity can be used to express the surprising state that triggers an abductive reasoning but it can also encapsulate its result in such a way that it can be understood in relation to evidentiality. Thus, at least in some cases of complex mirativity, mirativity may convey indication about the source of information. Interesting for studies on dialogue is that they also indicate the degree of commitment of the speakers with the content of their own utterances.

The negative particles lā/ ’al in Ugaritic change from positive to negative in modal contexts, conditional, questions, disjunctions, etc. They have usually been studied from a Semitic and linguistic points of view. On the basis of their occurrence in Ugaritic texts, we pretend to explain their uncommon behaviour from a philosophical and logico-semantic perspective. Is it possible to translate this linguistic structure in our Modern languages? Starting from a general view of their use in Ugaritic language, we claim that this phenomenon can be more clearly understood in relation to modality. We interpret these negation as a negative evidential paradigm and we explain how they change in different contexts. Methodologically, we make use of formal tools of Dynamic Epistemic Logic in order to provide a more fine-grained understanding of these negations, and their dynamics.