Theoretical and Manipulative Abduction

Abstract

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