Abduction Without a Body? Representational Grounding and the Abduction Loop for Scientific Hypothesis Generation
Can scientific abduction occur without continuous sensorimotor embodiment? Recent arguments in AI and philosophy of science hold that genuine hypothesis generation requires an agent continuously coupled to the physical world. We defend a narrower claim: online embodiment is not necessary for every abductive scientific act. Our focus is identity abduction: the inference that two independently developed structures are one object under an explicit correspondence, reached through representational grounding rather than bodily interaction. An agent may acquire new inferential affordances not through physical interaction but through transformations into representations that expose latent invaria...
| Authors | Michael Farmer |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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