I will show how abduction represents the fundamental form of hypothetical reasoning that also underlies human creativity and scientific discovery. Adopting an eco-cognitive perspective, I will demonstrate that abduction is not a purely internal mental process, but a distributed, embodied, and environmentally embedded activity. Through external manipulations, models, and environmental affordances, humans generate creative hypotheses that turn the world into cognitive resources. The notion of “eco-cognitive openness” underscores the plasticity of these systems, explaining how selective abduction - and especially creative abduction - produce epistemic novelty and sustain discoverability in complex contexts. The relationship between abduction, modeling, and creativity is thus reframed as a genuine ecology of cognition capable of accounting for the origin and long-term sustainability of cognitive innovation.

References

L. Magnani (2022), Discoverability. The Urgent Need of an Ecology of Human Creativity, Springer, Cham, Switzerland.

L. Magnani (2017), The Abductive Structure of Scientific Creativity. An Essay on the Ecology of Cognition, Springer, Cham, Switzerland.