Theoretical and Manipulative Abduction

Abstract

More than a hundred years ago, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, when working on logical and philosophicalproblems, suggested the concept of pragmatism (“pragmaticism”, in his own words) as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practicalmeaning. Many authors have illustrated creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. Infact, many philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but they aim at demonstratingthat the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, obscure, and thus not analyzable.