Crafting Knowledge Through Manipulating the Environment: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding

The paper analyses Lorenzo Magnani’s classification of abduction into selective and creative types, as well as his division between sentential and model-based abduction and between theoretical and manipulative abduction. The main focus is on the latter. Magnani’s work on manipulative abduction emphasizes the importance of external objects and artifacts called epistemic mediators in reasoning, where interaction with the environment is crucial for generating insights. This aspect of Magnani’s perspective shares affinities with distributed cognition, extended cognition, and the extended mind hypothesis. Yet, the article highlights how Magnani maintains a distinct focus on the internal cognitive processes necessary for comprehension. In fact, he develops a computational and cognitive view of understanding that is, in fact, akin to Johnson-Laird’s theory of mental models, identifying understanding as an internal act of the mind and a prerogative attributable to the subject. The acts and processes that constitute understanding, even when they rely on a prolonged and systematic use of epistemic mediators, need to be grasped and reproduced internally through the construction of a mental model that effectively synthesizes and systematizes the information related to properties, structures, and relationships. Ultimately, the article argues that Magnani’s theory of understanding is only partially aligned with theoretical positions in the contemporary debate such as distributed cognition, extended cognition, and the extended mind towards which Magnani has at times expressed theoretical sympathy.