Perspective switching as event affordance: The ontogeny of abductive reasoning

Abstract

AbstractThe present model identifies Index as the representational component driving children’s advances in abductive reasoning, capitalizing upon the means to subjunctivize within constructed events. As such, an essential semiotic device underlies the recognition of shifting perspectives to operationalize abductive reasoning within event profiles. Beyond using Index to establish the point of orientation (Origo), one “tries on” that Origo’s covert and overt orientation via deictic terms that encode Origo’s role as a conversational on-looker of an episode. This subjunctive competence entails taking note of cause-effect relations to anticipate the affective, social, cognitive, and physical viewpoints likely to be assumed by that Origo. Hypothesis-making then entails going beyond grounded experience to represent intermediate and final states of affairs for other Origos. Abductions require dynamically imaging how distinctive agents affect action schemes together with their relied-upon judgments to effectuate resultative states. The use of indexically grounded cognitions (given their role in preempting event relations) rivets the onlooker to the “why” of unexpected events and increases the likelihood that the guess of another within novel contexts is plausible. Shifting perspectives underlie abductions because they trigger defeasible but plausible explanations for puzzling events.