The recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction, as a means to originate and refine new concepts and hypotheses. Traditional Cognitive science and computational accounts concerning abduction aim to illustrate discovery and creativity processes in terms of theoretical and „internal‟ aspects, by means of computational simulations and/or abstract cognitive models. Nevertheless, especially concrete manipulations of the external world constitute a fundamental passage in chance discovery: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses (epistemic mediators) for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way. In this manner, it is possible to create implicit knowledge through doing and to produce various opportunities to find, for example, anomalies and fruitful new risky perspectives. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery but also in ethical/spiritual thinking and in moral deliberation. Moral reasoning could be viewed as a form of „possible worlds‟ anticipation, a way of getting chances to shape the human world and act in it. It could be of help to prefigure risks, possibilities, and effects of human acting, and to promote or prevent a broad variety of guidelines. Creating ethics means creating the cultural/spiritual world and its directions, in front of different (real or abstract) situations and problems. In this way, events and situations can be reinvented either as an opportunity or as a risk for new moral directions. The second part of the paper describes some of the „templates‟ of manipulative behaviour which account for the most common cognitive and moral acting related to chance discovery and chance production.

Foreshadowing ethical and spiritual chances. The role of moral mediators

MAGNANI, LORENZO
2013-01-01

Abstract

The recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction, as a means to originate and refine new concepts and hypotheses. Traditional Cognitive science and computational accounts concerning abduction aim to illustrate discovery and creativity processes in terms of theoretical and „internal‟ aspects, by means of computational simulations and/or abstract cognitive models. Nevertheless, especially concrete manipulations of the external world constitute a fundamental passage in chance discovery: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses (epistemic mediators) for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way. In this manner, it is possible to create implicit knowledge through doing and to produce various opportunities to find, for example, anomalies and fruitful new risky perspectives. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery but also in ethical/spiritual thinking and in moral deliberation. Moral reasoning could be viewed as a form of „possible worlds‟ anticipation, a way of getting chances to shape the human world and act in it. It could be of help to prefigure risks, possibilities, and effects of human acting, and to promote or prevent a broad variety of guidelines. Creating ethics means creating the cultural/spiritual world and its directions, in front of different (real or abstract) situations and problems. In this way, events and situations can be reinvented either as an opportunity or as a risk for new moral directions. The second part of the paper describes some of the „templates‟ of manipulative behaviour which account for the most common cognitive and moral acting related to chance discovery and chance production.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11571/768031
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