Lorenzo Magnani

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Pavia

Starting from classical philosophical suggestions about the status of happiness recipes that suggest the optimal ways to reach it I will soon illustrate the fundamental Kantian suggestion: “No one can coerce me to be happy”, that is an individual has the right to choose its own kind of happiness “provided he does not infringe upon that freedom of o...

p dir="ltr"> Eco-cognitive computationalism is a cognitive science perspective that views computing in context, focusing on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. It emphasizes the role of Turing in the development of the Logical Universal Machine and the concept of machines as “domesticated ignorant entities”. This perspective explains how...

This article seeks to outline the effective integration of semiotic methods, particularly the Peircean approach, with research on human creative cognition. The aim is to elucidate the involvement of the mind and neurological mechanisms in the process of semiosis. By examining how the mind externalizes thoughts and ideas, the article offers a fresh...

In this article the problem of discoverability and abductive creativity in scientific cognition will be characterized by the analysis of current difficulties that affect various aspects of the scientific enterprise such as in the case of the organization of Research and Development in biopharmaceutical companies. I will contend that this case symbo...

Throughout my investigation into abductive cognition, which is also associated with the endeavor to naturalize logic of its special consequence relation, I stressed the relevance of the following key elements: 'optimization of eco-cognitive situatedness', 'maximization of changeability' of both input and output of the general form of an inferential...

In this article, we want to demonstrate how thoughts experiments (TEs) incorporate cognitive structures—abductive inferences as conceptual metaphors—that reliably underpin everyday thinking and are enhanced and rendered more effective in scientific and philosophical contexts. Indeed one might successfully rethink the inferential structure at the he...

In this chapter I will analyze some important aspects of the organization of Research and Development (R &D) in the case of biopharmaceutical companies, which represent a prototypical situation of what I call impoverished epistemic niches.

The concept of cognitive niche is useful to frame morality and violence in a naturalistic perspective. The first sections of this chapter aim at deepening our understanding of this concept, taking advantage of an evolutionary framework that is ideally linked to the considerations I have provided in chapter one, focused on the role of coalition enfo...

In the paper “Philosophy – The luxurious supplement of violence”, Bevan Catley (2003) says In many of the growing number of accounts of workplace violence there exists a particular sense of certainty; a certain confidence in what violence “really” is. With these accounts, philosophy appears unnecessary – and even luxurious – in the face of the obvi...

The concept of violence can be usefully enriched taking advantage of Thom’s theory of morphogenesis, based on the catastrophe theory.

Among the philosophers, Derrida is the only one to clearly analyze and explore the link between violence and writing, offering reflections of great value on the subject.

Marxian emphasis on the extremely violent aspects – a list of the main cases is also provided – of the so-called “enclosures”, as fundamental procedures that favored the “primitive accumulation”, that is the first social and economic step that led to capitalism.

An important research in the area of psychology that can enrich our perspective on the relationship between morality and violence concerns the so-called moral disengagement illustrated by Bandura (1999). The neglect of moral conduct is widespread in moral agents: moral standards, even if previously adopted as guidelines for self-sanctioning and to...

The main problem I want to address here is related to a kind of prosaic paradox, which everybody knows: on one side religions are a way of explaining the genesis of violence – for example in terms of spiritual evasion, like in the case of Kierkegaard’s vision – and a way of escaping it but, at the same time, insofar as religions are carriers of mor...

Morality is the effort to guide one’s conduct by reasons, that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing. From a cognitive perspective, there are many types of moral hypotheses that provide good reasons in practical and moral deliberation and action. They can take the form of principles, rules, prototypes, previous analogical cases, examp...

This article explores the issue of discoverability and abductive creativity in scientific cognition, focusing on the challenges faced by biopharmaceutical companies in their R&D organization. The author argues that these companies are generating “impoverished epistemic niches”, which threaten fundamental aspects of modern science. The author propos...

Recent studies on the so-called EEEE (extended, embodied, embedded, and enacted) cognition have demonstrated that the “environmental situatedness” of human cognition and its evolutionary component may be used to better understand cognition in general. This indicates that humans do not keep in their memory ample representations of the surroundings a...

Abductive cognition refers to all kinds of reasoning to more or less deep hypotheses starting from data, both in humans and in AI machines, which are extremely important in everyday reasoning but also, for example, in scientific practice. In this chapter attention will be focused on those particular kinds of abductive cognition that generate deep r...

Locked and unlocked strategies are at the center of this article as ways of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines. The character and the role of these cognitive strategies, which are occurring both in humans and in computational machines, is indeed strictly related to the generation of cognitive outputs, which range...

Eco-cognitive computationalism explores computing in context, adhering to some of the key ideas presented by modern cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. First of all, when physical computation is seen from the perspective of the ecology of cognition it is possible to clearly understand the role Turing ass...

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmo...

Starting from the analysis of Marx’s Chapter 26 of the first volume of Capital, this article describes Marxian emphasis on the extremely violent aspects—a list of the main cases is also provided—of the so-called “enclosures” as fundamental procedures that favored the “primitive accumulation”, that is, the first social and economic step that led to...

This chapter offers a revision of the concept of ignorance discussed in recent models of abduction. Both ignorance preservation (GW-schema) and the tentative explanationism (AKM-schema) will be reanalyzed from an ecological and distributed perspective on cognition, instead coherent with the so-called EC-Model of abduction. We are convinced that a s...

Fruitfully approaching the problems of discoverability involves an important intermediate step, which concerns the role of abductive cognition, that is reasoning to hypotheses and the logical models of it. To this aim, when engaged in formalizing abductive reasoning, it is extremely useful to see inferences adopting the more general concepts of inp...

In this chapter, with the help of the concepts of locked and unlocked strategies, abduction, and optimization of eco-cognitive openness, I will describe some central aspects of the cognitive character of reasoning strategies and related heuristics, to the aim of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines and on how they a...

In this chapter I will analyze some important aspects of the organization of Research and Development (R&D) in the case of biopharmaceutical companies, which represent a prototypical situation of what I call impoverished epistemic niches. At least in this case we clearly see a challenge to the epistemic integrity of modern science. Taking advantage...

Taking advantage of the logical and cognitive studies illustrated in the previous chapters, which emphasize the crucial role played in abductive cognition by the so-called “optimization of eco-cognitive openness and situadedness”, “knowledge in motion”, and the concept of “epistemic irresponsibility”, the present chapter will introduce the concept...

Recent research in the area of the so-called EEEE cognition (extended, embodied, embedded, enacted) has shown that human cognition and its evolutionary dimension can be better understood in terms of their environmental situatedness. This means humans do not retain in their memory rich representations of the environment and its variables, but they a...

I propose that the relationship between moral and violent behavior is overlooked in current philosophical, epistemological, and cognitive studies. To the aim of clarifying the complex dynamics of this interplay, I will describe, adopting an evolutionary perspective, the concepts of coalition enforcement, cognitive moral niche, and of what I call mo...

Locked and unlocked strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences...

We have already delineated some basic aspects of the so-called eco-cognitive computationalism, for example the fact that computation is always seen in context, exploiting the ideas developed in those projects that have originated the recent views on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. As illustrated in the previous chapter Turing’s origi...

The concepts of information, computation, and cognition are variously interpreted and explained and still lead to ambiguous results.

In 2015, Google DeepMind’s program AlphaGo (able to perform the famous Go game) beat Fan Hui, the European Go champion and a 2 dan (out of 9 dan) professional, five times out of five with no handicap on a full size 19 \(\times \) 19 board.

In the first two chapters of this book we have stressed that eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, following some of the main tenets advanced by the recent cognitive science views on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. We have also described the new attention in computer science devoted to the relevance in computati...

This book mainly focuses on the widely distributed nature of computational tools, models, and methods, ultimately related to the current importance of computational machines as mediators of cognition. An entirely new eco-cognitive approach to computation is offered, to underline the question of the overwhelming cognitive domestication of ignorant e...

The externalist currents in cognitive science have overturned different assumptions regarding how our cognition works: disembodiment, computationalism, and representationalism have been dethroned as untouchable premises and openly discussed from both ontological and epistemological perspectives. To be sure, different good old-fashioned concepts suc...

In the current philosophical and psychological literature, knowledge avoidance and willful ignorance seem to be almost identical conditions involved in irrational patterns of reasoning. In this paper, we will argue that not only these two phenomena should be distinguished, but that they also fall into different parts of the epistemic rationality-ir...

Eco-cognitive computationalism considers computation in context, following some of the main tenets advanced by the recent cognitive science views on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. It is in the framework of this eco-cognitive perspective that we can usefully analyze the recent attention in computer science devoted to the importance o...

My book Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (2009) basically refers to all kinds of human hypothetical cognition, also of creative kind. During the research related to the preparation of that book I soon had the opportunity to examine the studies regarding the human process of continuous d...

Taking advantage of Denis Noble’s description, in “The Illusions of the Modern Synthesis” of the first illusion, related to the concept of natural selection itself, I will further strengthen the criticism by adding three groups of considerations mainly concerning human cognition: 1) how semiotic brains build cognitive niches; 2) the role of abducti...

The present contribution describes the nature of social practices based on habitual behavior. The first part concerns the notion of “habit” from a perspective that crosses philosophy and science. Habits structure our daily life and possess a social nature, as shown by informally shared habits and institutionalized rituals. After a brief reference t...

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in...

Modern technology has brought about consequences of such magnitude that old policies and ethics can no longer contain them. Technological advances have made nature an object of human responsibility, and, as a result, if we are to restore and ensure her health, we must employ clever new approaches and rich, updated scientific and ethical knowledge....

In my opinion, it is only in the framework of a research dealing with abductive cognition that we can analyze important cognitive aspects of human and machine capacities. From the point of view of human (and of some animal, mammals for example) capacities the phenomenological concept of anticipation (seen as a kind of abduction), which is related t...

During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discov...

Research on autonomy exhibits a constellation of variegated perspectives, from the problem of the crude deprivation of it to the study of the distinction between personal and moral autonomy, and from the problem of the role of a “self as narrator”, who classifies its own actions as autonomous or not, to the importance of the political side and, fin...

In the current epistemological debate scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories, but also rubricated under various new labels: from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing s...

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, adopting the intellectual visions advanced by the cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. It is in this framework that we can fruitfully study the relevance in recent computer science devoted to the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks genera...

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, adopting the intellectual visions advanced by the cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. It is in this framework that we can fruitfully study the relevance in recent computer science devoted to the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks genera...

Eco-cognitive computationalism considers computation in the context of following some of the main tenets advanced by the recent cognitive science views on embodied, situated and distributed cognition. It is in the framework of this eco-cognitive perspective that we can usefully analyze the recent attention in computer science devoted to the importa...

Ritual artifacts are produced by individuals and/or small groups, left over-there, in the environment, perceivable, sharable, and more or less available. Artifacts of this type can be considered cognitive mediators, insofar as they are collective memory stores of related habits, in the sense that they mediate and make available the story of their o...

Ritual artifacts are produced by individuals and/or small groups, left over-there, in the environment, perceivable, sharable, and more or less available. Artifacts of this type can be considered cognitive mediators, insofar as they are collective memory stores of related habits, in the sense that they mediate and make available the story of their o...

Eco-cognitive computationalism considers computation in the context of following some of the main tenets advanced by the recent cognitive science views on embodied, situated and distributed cognition. It is in the framework of this eco-cognitive perspective that we can usefully analyze the recent attention in computer science devoted to the importa...

To undertake a serious investigation of violence calls for a discrete amount of courage and sincerity: as human beings we can wishfully ignore our own violence, thanks to a kind of “embubblement” I am illustrating in this article. I would also like to offer to the attention of researchers in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry the main features o...

This article aims to investigate how information-sharing mechanisms in online communities favor activities of ignorance distribution on their platforms, such as fake data, biased beliefs, and inaccurate statements. In brief, the authors claim that online communities provide more ways to connect the users to one another rather than to control the qu...

I will analyse three fundamental ways of governing ignorance though abduction, which are essential from an eco-cognitive and eco-logical point of view, in which the central role in human cognition of natural and artefactual environment is taken into account. First of all, according to the so-called GW-schema, proposed by Gabbay and Woods, abduction...

The present article is devoted to illustrate the issue of the model-based and extra-theoretical dimension of cognition from the perspective of the famous discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. This case study is particularly appropriate because it shows relevant aspects – creative – of diagrammatic cognition, which involve intertwined processes of...

In this paper, we aim at explaining the relevance of thought experiments (TEs) in philosophy and the history of science by describing them as particular instances of two categories of creative thinking: metaphorical reasoning and abductive cognition. As a result of this definition, we will claim that TEs hold an ignorance-preserving trait that is e...

This article aims at introducing the concept of manipulative abduction, by showing how we can find at various levels of cognitive activity various methods of manipulative constructivity. From this perspective, also creativity and discovery are no longer seen as mysterious irrational processes, but, thanks to constructive accounts, they are viewed a...

Locked and unlocked strategies are at the center of this article, as ways of shedding new light on the cognitive aspects of deep learning machines. The character and the role of these cognitive strategies, which are occurring both in humans and in computational machines, is indeed strictly related to the generation of cognitive outputs, which range...

In this paper we aim at discussing cognitive and epistemic features of online communities, by the use of cognitive niche constructions theories, presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Virtual cognitive niches can be considered as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment performed by age...

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important and innovative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR18), held on October 24–26 2018 in Seville, Spa...

The naturalization of logic aims at a revision of mainstream logic. In this article, I contend it is an urgent task to be completed. This new project will permit a new collaboration between logic and cognitive science. This can be accomplished doing for logic what many decades ago Quine and other philosophers undertook in the case of epistemology....

The concepts of manipulative abduction and of extending, disembodying, and distributing the mind can help delineate important aspects of the role of habits, rituals, and symbols in human cognition, including when new concepts are created. Taking advantage of some psychoanalytical and anthropological issues, I will show how symbolic habits in ritual...

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation in context, exploiting the ideas developed in those projects that have originated the recent views on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. Turing’s original intellectual perspective has already clearly depicted the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first ru...

This chapter advocates a re-introduction of the notion of cyborg in order to acquire a new perspective on studies concerning the development of human cognition in highly technological environments. In particular, it shows how the notion of cyborg properly engages cognitive issues that have a powerful resonance especially as far as social cognition...

The process of building new hypotheses can be clarified by the eco-cognitive model (EC-Model) of abduction I have recently introduced. I will take advantage of three examples: (1) a new interpretation of Aristotle’s seminal work on abduction, which stresses the need, to build creative and selective abductive hypotheses, of a situation of eco-cognit...

This article aims to investigate how information-sharing mechanisms in online communities favor activities of ignorance distribution on their platforms, such as fake data, biased beliefs, and inaccurate statements. In brief, the authors claim that online communities provide more ways to connect the users to one another rather than to control the qu...

Cognitive niche theories consist in a theoretical framework that is proving extremely profitable in bridging evolutionary biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology by offering an inter-disciplinary ground, laden with novel approaches and debates. At the same time, cognitive niche theories are multiple, and differently related to nich...

Cognitive niche construction theory provides a new comprehensive account for the development of human cultural and social organization with respect to the management of their environment. Cognitive niche construction can be seen as a way of lessening complexity and unpredictability of a given environment. In this paper, we are going to analyze econ...

Warfare

In this chapter I will illustrate how scientific modeling activity can be better described taking advantage of the concept of “epistemic warfare”, which sees scientific enterprise as a complicated struggle for rational knowledge in which it is crucial to distinguish epistemic (for example scientific models) from non epistemic (for example fictions,...

In this chapter I will analyze some important aspects of the organization of Research and Development (R&D) in the case of biopharmaceutical companies, which represent a prototypical situation of what I call impoverished epistemological niches.

Abduction is a procedure in which something that lacks classical explanatory epistemic virtue can be accepted because it has virtue of another kind: (Gabbay and Woods 2005) contend (GW-Schema) that abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character.

The analysis of abductive processes illustrated in the previous chapters, in terms of the effort to naturalize the logic of its special consequence relation, leads us to the emphasis on the importance of the following main aspects: “optimization of eco-cognitive situatedness”, “maximization of changeability” of both input and output of the general...

In the current epistemological debate scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories, but also rubricated under various new labels: from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing s...