Let Us Investigate! Dynamic Conjecture-Making as the Formal Logic of Abduction

We present a dynamic approach to Peirce’s original construal of abductive logic as a logic of conjecture making, and provide a new decidable, contraction-free and cut-free proof system for the dynamic logic of abductive inferences with neighborhood semantics. Our formulation of the dynamic logic of abduction follows the philosophical and scientific track that led Peirce to his late, post-1903 characterization of abductive conclusions as investigands, namely invitations to investigate propositions conjectured at the level of pre-beliefs.     

The anatomy of adolescents’ emotional engagement in schoolwork

This study explores the complexity of emotionally engaging schoolwork among students by analysing the interrelation between the affective and the social dimensions of emotional engagement. The data were collected from 78 Finnish sixth-grade (aged 12–13 years) and 89 eighth-grade (aged 14–15 years) students using picture tasks. The results show that the main elements of the affective dimension are the valuing of schoolwork and the enjoyment of learning, and the main element of the social dimension is a sense of belonging in terms of social cohesion and the support experienced by students. Furthermore, the results suggest that emotional engagement has internal dynamics: the affective and social dimension influence each other, regulating the students’ sense of emotional engagement. Consequently, neither of the dimensions alone result in strong, balanced emotional engagement. In addition, the results show that the relation between the affective and social dimension was more unbalanced in the peer interaction than in the teacher–student interaction at both grade levels. This suggests that tensions in the peer interaction at school make for a more complicated context in terms of emotional engagement.     

GEOMETRIC ILLUSIONS

The effects of instruction and training on the magnitude of illusion were investigated using as stimuli Müller-Lyer, Müller-Lyer-Ebbinghaus, and Oppel's figure, and a perspective illusion. The subjects estimated the difference between the standard and the variable. The results suggest that changes in judging attitudes, and perceptual learning, contribute to the decrement of illusion during repeated presentation; adaptation to a two-dimensional stimulus world seems to affect the size of illusions which can be explained on the basis of constancy theory. The interactions between the treatments were fairly high.     

The Science to Save Us from Philosophy of Science

Are knowledge and belief pivotal in science, as contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science nearly universally take them to be? I defend the view that scientists are not primarily concerned with knowing and that the methods of arriving at scientific hypotheses, models and scenarios do not commit us having stable beliefs about them. Instead, what drives scientific discovery is ignorance that scientists can cleverly exploit. Not an absence or negation of knowledge, ignorance concerns fundamental uncertainty, and is brought out by retroductive (abductive) inferences, which are roughly characterised as reasoning from effects to causes. I argue that recent discoveries in sciences that coped with under-structured problem spaces testify the prevalence of retroductive logic in scientific discovery and its progress. This puts paid to the need of finding epistemic justification or confirmation to retroductive methodologies. A scientist, never frightened of unknown unknowns, strives to advance the forefront of uncertainty, not that of belief or knowledge. Far from rendering science irrational, I conclude that catering well for the right conditions in which to cultivate ignorance is a key to how fertile retroductive inferences (true guesses) arise.