Vera Shumilina

The recent history of the field of “logics of discovery” spans half a century yet includes three major transformations in the general methodological framework. In order to discern the common patterns in this recent history of computational ideas, and to better guide future investigation in computer-related discovery in terms of reasoning by abduction, we first critically review the three phases of research from the computational point of view, focusing on the principles, achievements and obstacles in each stage. We show that the first, deductive phase, could not solve the problem of human-machine creativity. The second overemphasizes induction’s ability to discover novel hypotheses from data. The third, in turn, is an unfolding resolution to initiate the true discovery agenda via the abductive constructor we call Plausibly Anticipatorily Correct learning.

We critically examine the intersection of developmental bioelectricity within the context of the Peircean philosophy of science. We address the criticism of Peirce’s objective idealism and synechism, contest the conflation of semiotic and physical laws, and scrutinise Peirce’s recovery of physical from psychological laws. The upshot is a nonmechanistic, nonreductive interpretation of the evolution of cognition in the bioengineering realm. The work of Kull and others is leveraged to demarcate semiotics and physics, emphasising the irreducibility of bioelectric phenomena to mechanistic explanations. Our paper advocates for methodological synechism in evolutionary biology, highlighting the heightened roles of bioelectricity in morphogenesis and basal cognition. We propose the free-energy principle as a unifying arbiter that sets an explanatory pathway toward integrated cognition and meaning in developmental bioelectricity.

Following ideas of Ch. S. Peirce on continuity of mind (synechism) and universality of semiotic processes (pansemiotism) as well as development of the understanding of manipulative abduction in works of L. Magnani the thesis of possibility of abductive reasoning in non-human animal minds is defended. The animal capacity to form explanatory hypotheses is demonstrated by instances of grasping regularities in environment, behavior of conspecifics and even self-knowledge. In the framework of debate on instinctual or rather inferential nature of abductive capacity questions of innate and acquired mechanisms of learning, the role of language in development of explanations and priority of inner (emotional) or outer (referential) perspectives in genesis of first explanatory hypotheses are considered.

The paper focuses on the review of current literature on formal philosophy. Special attention is paid to the review of the book «Introduction to Formal Philosophy» [Hansson, Hendricks, 2018]. The book is a consistent introduction to the problems of formal philosophy, a research tradition that relies on the precise mathematical tools in order to study traditional philosophical problems. The methods of formal philosophy are successfully applied not only to the problems of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language but also relevant for the problems of ethics, axiology and social philosophy. The book demonstrates that it is not correct to identify formal philosophy with another area of study – philosophical logic, since formal philosophy uses not only logical methods of analysis, but also uses the tools of game theory, decision theory, probability theory, Bayesian statistics, and other theories. Although the book has a propaedeutic character, it also contains some open problems. These problems include the aggregation of the opinions of the group under the condition of a conflicting base of premises in the theory of public choice, there are still open problems in the interpretation of Arrow’s impossibility theorem and others. Certainly, formalization in itself is not a general solution to the particular philosophical problem, but only a tool that allows to formulate a problem in a more rigorous and precise way, which sometimes allows to reveal some unexpected consequences, some implicit contradictions and new solutions. Despite the importance of the concept of coherence in ethics, decision theory, philosophy of law, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of science, the existing formalizations of the concept of coherence are highly specialized for epistemology, researchers recognize the lack of the relevant explanatory models. Overall, the book is an excellent introduction in to the field of formal philosophy, which provides a general overview of different aspects of formal philosophy and the opportunity to study particular research topics by means of an extensive bibliography accompanying each of the chapters.