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5 results

Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation
  • A Granular Approach
  • Kenneth Aizawa
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • Abductive reasoning is a form of inference that infers some hypothesis because of what that hypothesis explains. Unlike deductive reasoning, it yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. The theory of compositional abduction developed in this book provides a novel theory of confirmation. Aizawa uses case studies to analyse how scientists interpret the results of experiments to support compositional hypotheses (hypotheses about what things are composed of) and suggests that they use a kind of abduction. His theory is offered as an alternative account of scientific reasoning that the logical empiricists would have interpreted as hypothetico-deductive confirmation. It is also an alternative to the Peircean interpretation of the role of abduction in science. It will be valuable to philosophers of science, those working on hypothetico-deductive confirmation, Peirce's view of abduction, inference to the best explanation, and the New Mechanism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  • Abduction and Composition

  • Kenneth Aizawa, Drew B. Headley
  • Journal:
    Philosophy of Science / Volume 89 / Issue 2 / April 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 February 2022, pp. 268-282
    Print publication:
    April 2022
    • Article
      • You have access
      • Open access
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  • Some New Mechanists have proposed that claims of compositional relations are justified by combining the results of top-down and bottom-up interlevel interventions. But what do scientists do when they can perform, say, a cellular intervention, but not a subcellular detection? In such cases, paired interlevel interventions are unavailable. We propose that scientists use abduction and we illustrate its use through a case study of the ionic theory of resting and action potentials.

  • Consciousness: Don't Give Up on the Brain

  • Kenneth Aizawa
  • Journal:
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements / Volume 67 / October 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 July 2010, pp. 263-284
    Print publication:
    October 2010

  • In the extended mind literature, one sometimes finds the claim that there is no neural correlate of consciousness. Instead, there is a biological or ecological correlate of consciousness. Consciousness, it is claimed, supervenes on an entire organism in action. Alva Noë is one of the leading proponents of such a view. This paper resists Noë's view. First, it challenges the evidence he offers from neuroplasticity. Second, it presses a problem with paralysis. Third, it draws attention to a challenge from the existence of metamers and visual illusions.

  • Chapter 5 - Why the Mind Is Still in the Head

  • from Part II - Conceptual Foundations
  • Edited by Philip Robbins, Washington University, St Louis, Murat Aydede, University of Florida
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    03 November 2008, pp 78-95

  • Summary

    Philosophical interest in situated cognition has been focused most intensely on the claim that human cognitive processes extend from the brain into the tools humans use. Coupling arguments are far and away the primary sort of argument given in support of transcranialism. What is common to these arguments is a tacit move from the observation that process X is in some way causally connected (coupled) to a cognitive process Y to the conclusion that X is part of the cognitive process Y. Transcranialism is regularly backed by some form of coupling-constitution fallacy and that it does not have an adequate account of the difference between the cognitive and the noncognitive. A more nagging worry is the motivation for transcranialism. The difference explains why even transcranialists maintain that cognition extends from brains into the extraorganismal world rather than from the extraorganismal world into brains.