Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

From the logical point of view, abduction is a procedure in which something that lacks classical explanatory epistemic virtue can be accepted because it has virtue of another kind: the GW-Model contends that abduction presents an ignorancepreserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character. From this perspective abductive reasoning is a response to an ignoranceproblem. Is abduction really ignorance-preserving? To better answer this question I will take advantage of my eco-cognitive model (EC-model) of abduction. It will be illustrated, also thanks to cognitive and epistemological considerations, that through abduction, knowledge can be enhanced, even when abduction is not considered an inference to the best explanation in the classical sense of the expression, that is an inference necessarily characterized by an empirical evaluation phase.