Are Heuristics Knowledge–Enhancing? Abduction, Models, and Fictions in Science

Abstract

In my opinion, it is only in the framework of a study concerning abductive inference that we can correctly and usefully grasp the cognitive status of heuristics. To this aim, it is useful to see heuristics in the perspective of the so-called fill-up and cutdown problems, which characterize abductive cognition. Abduction is a procedure in which something that lacks classical explanatory epistemic virtue can be accepted because it has virtue of another kind: [9] contend (GW-Model) that abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character. The question is: are abductive heuristic strategies always ignorance preserving? To better reframe the cognitive status of heuristics I will take advantage of my eco-cognitive model (EC-model) of abduction. I contend that, through abductive heuristics, knowledge can be enhanced, even when abduction is not considered an inference to the best explanation in the classical sense of the expression, that is an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase, or inductive phase, as Peirce called it. Hintikka maintains, implicity agreeing with the perspective on abduction as ignorance-preserving, that the true justification of a rule of abductive inference is a strategic one, but this strategic justification does not warrant any specific step of the whole process. I argue, taking advantage of a distinction between static and dynamic aspects of scientific inquiry, that this does mean that every abductive guess heuristically reached is damned to be ignorance-preserving if evidentially inert. When Hintikka contends that the abductive steps which lead to intermediate models cannot have “warrants” at the level of strategic justification, and also at the level of non strategic justification, in my perspective we can relieve ourselves of this burden of epistemic sufferance just acknowledging we are dealing with creative models. If we only see models in empirical science in the light of the future achieved empirical success, we obviously see them just as provisional guesses, devoid of justification and still and intrinsically looking for it. On the contrary, they are occasionally justified by themselves—abductively—just because creative, and so constitutive of a fruitful epistemic “heuristic cognitive travel”. Finally, I will illustrate that also in deduction the presence of abductive heuristic events coincides with their knowledge-enhancing character: here too these strategic aspects reflect the pure—productive—conjectural element of abductive inference and its capacity to guessing right.