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An interesting and neglected point of contention about human reasoning is whether or not concrete manipulations of external objects influence the generation of hypotheses, for example in science: in the following chapter I will delineate the first features of what I call manipulative abduction showing how we can find methods of constructivity in scientific and everyday reasoning based on external models and “epistemic mediators”.
Manipulation of external objects in scientific experiments is a kind of this “epistemic mediator, also exploiting the cognitive resources of human body and its performances. The discovery programs that address the process of experiment constitute the first attempt to automatize these abilities, that could further extend the interest of machine discovery in science also to the whole area of robotics.