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Abductive Minds: Essays in Honor of Lorenzo Magnani - Volume 1

  • Book
  • Oct 2025

Overview

Editors:
  1. Selene Arfini

    1. Department of Humanities – Philosophy Section, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

  • The first book to comment on Magnani’s logical, epistemological, and cognitive contributions to abductive reasoning
  • Contains articles of experts on hot topics in logic, the philosophy of science, and philosophy of cognitive science
  • Proposes new perspectives on abduction as an inference, its logical models, and its role in cognitive activities

Part of the book series: Synthese Library (SYLI, volume 505)

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About this book

This book, the first of two volumes, provides novel perspectives on the study of abduction, by analyzing both Magnani’s ample investigation of the subject and discussing its rising importance in today’s epistemology and philosophy of science. Notwithstanding the long history of the concept, which has been studied since its analysis in Aristotle’s Organon, in the last fifty years, it has known a resurgent interest in the epistemological literature since it is an ampliative inference deemed to be at the core of creative leaps and acts of discovery. For these reasons, different open questions still bother interested researchers: which constraints affect abductive reasoning when a hypothesis is evaluated or selected? Should we adopt a unified view on abduction or maintain a pluralistic perspective regarding its forms and functions? What kinds of models can be used in abductive reasoning? This last question, in particular, shows how the topics of the two parts of the volume are intrinsically connected and ensures they are of great importance to those interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, mathematical logic and AI.

Keywords

  • abductive minds
  • Abduction
  • Model-based reasoning
  • Scientific discovery
  • Computationalism
  • Charles Sanders Peirce
  • scientific cognition
  • Computational Philosophy

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Humanities – Philosophy Section, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Selene Arfini

About the editor

Selene Arfini is a Research Fellow and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section, of the University of Pavia, where she is also a member of the Computational Philosophy Laboratory. Her work revolves around three main research questions: How do human agents cognitively cope with their ignorance? What kinds of adjustments to their epistemic perspective should they apply to discover something new? How do smart technology devices impact their cognitive possibilities? She recently published a book entitled Ignorant Cognition. A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing (2019) and co-edited different collections of articles and special issues on 4E cognition (2023 - Embodied, Extended, Ignorant Minds. New Studies on the Nature of Not-Knowing), chance-based reasoning (2022 - Enacting Chance: Ignorance Insight and Intuition), abduction (2023 - Abduction, Creative Cognition, and Discovery - Part of the Handbook of Abductive Cognition), and the definition of ignorance (2020 - Knowing the Unknown: Philosophical Perspectives on Ignorance). She has also published different articles in international journals of epistemology, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of technology, and general philosophy of science.

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Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Abductive Minds: Essays in Honor of Lorenzo Magnani - Volume 1

  • Editors: Selene Arfini

  • Series Title: Synthese Library

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-96683-5Due: 25 October 2025

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-96686-6Due: 25 October 2026

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-96684-2Due: 25 October 2025

  • Series ISSN: 0166-6991

  • Series E-ISSN: 2542-8292

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: X, 215

  • Number of Illustrations: 14 b/w illustrations

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