Abduction and Chance The Extra-Theoretical Dimension of Chance Discovery in Science

Science is one of the most creative forms of human reasoning. It has been stressed that scientific discovery is a mysterious process, involving irrationality and any kind of unexplainable feelings and emotions. By rejecting that point of view, the recent epistemological and cognitive studies concentrate on the concept of abduction, as a means to originate and refine new ideas. First of all I will illustrate in this paper that some typical internal abductive processes are involved in chance discovery and production (for example through radical innovations). Nevertheless, especially concrete manipulations of the external world constitute a fundamental passage in chance discovery: by a process of manipulative abduction it is possible to build prostheses (epistemic mediators) for human minds, by interacting with external objects and representations in a constructive way. In this manner it is possible to create implicit knowledge through doing and to produce various opportunity to find, for example, anomalies and fruitful new risky perspectives. This kind of embodied and unexpressed knowledge holds a key role in the subsequent processes of scientific comprehension and discovery. The paper describes some of the "templates" of manipulative behavior which account for the most common cognitive and epistemic acting related to chance discovery and chance production.