Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

Lorenzo Magnani
LMAGNANI @ UNIPV. IT
Department of Philosophy and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy

Abstract
The first part of the paper illustrates that at the
roots of chance discovery there is a process of
disembodiment of mind. This process exhibits
a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms
underling the emergence of scenarios productive for opportunities and risks. I will illustrate
the centrality to chance discoverability of the disembodiment of mind from the point of view of
the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay
critical in analyzing the relation between chance
discovery and dynamical interactions with the
environment. I also think the disembodiment
of mind can nicely account for low-level cognitive processes of chance production, bringing up
the question of how could higher-level processes
be comprised and how would they interact with
lower-level ones. To the aim of explaining these
higher-level mechanisms I provide the analysis
of model-based and manipulative abduction, and
of those external representations and epistemic
mediators that furnish prostheses able to support the creation of what I call hybrid scenarios.

1. From the Prehistoric Brains to

Environmental Scenarios
I will illustrate in this paper the centrality to chance discoverability of the disembodiment of mind from the point
of view of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in
analyzing the relation between chance discovery and dynamical interactions with the environment. As I will illustrate below the disembodiment of the mind - in the case for
instance of our primitive ancestors - is occurring when material culture disembodies thoughts (and provides chances
potentially significant to adopt new inferences and new acAppearing in Proceedings of the 4 th International Workshop on
Chance Discovery, Bonn, Germany, 2005. Copyright 2005 by the
author(s)/owner(s).

tions), that otherwise will soon disappear, without being

transmitted to other human beings. Through the mediation of the disembodied material culture the modern human
mind can arrive to internally think about new concepts and
meanings otherwise difficult to be grasped.
I think the disembodiment of mind can nicely account for
low-level cognitive processes of chance production, bringing up the question of how could higher-level processes be
comprised and how would they interact with lower-level
ones.
In an interesting article of 1950, Computing machinery
and intelligence (Turing, 1950), which adopts an evolutionary perspective, Turing maintains that a big cortex can
provide an evolutionary advantage only in presence of a
massive storage information and knowledge on external
supports that only an already developed small community
of human beings can possess. Evidence from paleoanthropology seems to support this perspective. Some research
in cognitive paleoanthropology teaches us that high level
and reflective consciousness in terms of thoughts about our
own thoughts and about our feelings (that is consciousness
not merely considered as raw sensation) is intertwined with
the development of modern language (speech) and material
culture. After 250.000 years ago several hominid species
had brains as large as ours today, but their behavior lacked
any sign of art or symbolic behavior. If we consider highlevel consciousness as related to a high-level organization
- in Turings sense - of human cortex, its origins can be related to the active role of environmental, social, linguistic,
and cultural aspects.
Handaxes were made by Early Humans and firstly appeared
1,4 million years ago, still made by some of the Neanderthals in Europe just 50.000 years ago. The making of
handaxes is strictly intertwined with the development of
consciousness. Many needed capabilities constitute a part
of an evolved psychology that appeared long before the first
handaxed were manufactured. It seems humans were preadapted for some components required to make handaxes
(Mithen, 1999): (cf. Figure 1)
1. imposition of symmetry (already evolved through
predators escape and social interaction). It has been

Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

53

1.1. Inner speech and fleeting consciousness

Two central factors play a fundamental role in the combination of the four resources above:
the exploitation of inner speech (speaking to oneself)
to trail between planning, fracture dynamic, motor
control and symmetry (also in children there is a kind
of inner muttering which makes explicit what is implicit in the various abilities);
a good degree of fleeting consciousness (thoughts
about thoughts).
Figure 1.

an unintentional by-product of the bifacial knapping

technique but also deliberately imposed in other cases.
It is also well-known that the attention to symmetry
may have developed through social interaction and
predator escape, as it may allow one to recognize that
one is being directly stared at (Dennett, 1991).
2. understanding fracture dynamics (for example evident
from Oldowan tools and from nut cracking by chimpanzees today);
3. ability to plan ahead (modifying plans and reacting to
contingencies, such unexpected flaws in the material
and miss-hits), still evident in the minds of Oldowan
tool makers and in chimpanzees;
4. high degree of sensory-motor control: Nodules, preforms, and near finished artefacts must be struck at
precisely the right angle with precisely the right degree of force if the desired flake is to be detached
(Mithen, 1999, p. 285). The origin of this capability is
usually tracked back to encephalization - the increased
number of nerve tracts and of the integration between
them allows for the firing of smaller muscle groups and bipedalism - that requires a more complex integrated highly fractionated nervous system, which in
turn presupposes a larger brain.
The combination of these four resources produced the birth
of what Mithen calls technical intelligence of early human
mind, that is consequently related to the construction of
handaxes. Indeed they indicate high intelligence and good
health. They cannot be compared to the artefacts made by
animals, like honeycomb or spider web, deriving from the
iteration of fixed actions which do not require consciousness and intelligence.

In the meantime these two aspects played a fundamental

role in the development of consciousness and thought:
So my argument is that when our ancestors made handaxes there were inner mutterings accompanying the crack of stone against
stone. Those inner mutterings were instrumental in pulling the knowledge required for handaxes manufacture into an emergent consciousness. But what type of consciousness? I think
probably one that was fleeting one: one that existed during the act of manufacture and that did
not the endure. One quite unlike the consciousness about ones emotions, feelings, and desires
that were associated with the social world and
that probably were part of a completely separated
cognitive domain, that of social intelligence, in
the early human mind (p. 288).
This use of inner speech can be certainly considered a
tool for organizing brains and so for manipulating, expanding, and exploring minds, a tool that probably evolved
with another: talking to each other. Both private and public
language act as tools for thought and play a fundamental
role in the evolution opening up our minds to ourselves
and so in the emergence of cognitive chances of new meanings.
1.2. Material culture as a chance scenario
Another tool appeared in the latter stages of human evolution, that played a great role in the evolutions of primitive
minds, that is in the organization of human brains. Handaxes also are at the birth of material culture, so as new
cognitive chances can co-evolve:
the mind of some early humans, like the Neanderthals,
were constituted by relatively isolated cognitive domains, Mithen calls different intelligences, probably endowed with different degrees of consciousness

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Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

about the thoughts and knowledge within each domain (natural history intelligence, technical intelligence, social intelligence). These isolated cognitive
domains became integrated also taking advantage of
the role of public language;
degrees of high level consciousness appear, human
beings need thoughts about thoughts; - social intelligence and public language arise.
It is extremely important to stress that material culture is
not just the product of this massive cognitive chance but
also cause of it. The clever trick that humans learnt was
to disembody their minds into the material world around
them: a linguistic utterance might be considered as a disembodied thought. But such utterances last just for a few
seconds. Material culture endures (p. 291).
In this perspective we acknowledge that material artefacts
are tools for thoughts as is language: tools for exploring,
expanding, and manipulating our own minds. They constitute the cognitive ancestors of those information artefacts (Amitani & Hori, 2004) or cognitive artifacts (Shibata & Hori, 2004) which constitute the external multiple
tools - communication, context shifting, computational devices expressly constructed to the aim of creating opportunities and risks, like KeyGraph, etc. - recently analyzed by
the researchers in the field of chance discovery (Oshawa &
McBurney, 2003).
Moreover, in this perspective the evolution of culture is inextricably linked with the evolution of consciousness and
thought. Early human brain becomes a kind of universal
intelligent machine, extremely flexible so that we did no
longer need different separated intelligent machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice. As the engineering problem of producing various machines for various
jobs is replaced by the office work of programming the
universal machine to do these jobs, so the different intelligences become integrated in a new universal device endowed with a high-level type of consciousness.
From this perspective the expansion of the minds is in the
meantime a continuous process of disembodiment of the
minds themselves into the material world around them. In
this regard the evolution of the mind is inextricably linked
with the evolution of large, integrated, material cognitive
systems. In the following section I will illustrate this extraordinary interplay between human brains and the new
cognitive systems they make.

2. Disembodiment of Mind
A wonderful example of chance creation productive for
the discovery of new concepts - through disembodiment of
mind - is the carving of what most likely is the mythical

Figure 2.

being from the last ice age, 30.000 years ago, a half human/half lion figure carved from mammoth ivory found at
Hohlenstein Stadel, Germany.
An evolved mind is unlikely to have a natural
home for this being, as such entities do not exist in the natural world, the mind needs new
chances: so whereas evolved minds could think
about humans by exploiting modules shaped by
natural selection, and about lions by deploying
content rich mental modules moulded by natural selection and about other lions by using other
content rich modules from the natural history
cognitive domain, how could one think about entities that were part human and part animal? Such
entities had no home in the mind (p. 291).
A mind consisting of different separated intelligences cannot come up with such entity (Figure 1). The only way is
to extend the mind into the material word, building in the
environment primitive scenarios1 made by rocks, blackboards, paper, ivory, and writing, painting, and carving:
artefacts such as this figure play the role of anchors for
ideas and have no natural home within the mind; for ideas
that take us beyond those that natural selection could enable us to possess (p. 291).
In the case of our figure we face with an anthropomorphic
thinking created by the material representation serving to
anchor the cognitive representation of supernatural being.
In this case the material culture disembodies thoughts (and
1
Ohsawa proposed this term to explain some aspects of change
discovery. Cf. for example (Nara & Ohsawa, 2004) that stresses
the attention on the activity of extracting chances through communication of scenarios: given that a scenario is a time series of
events under a given context, during a communication scenario
drawings are generated, externalized (that is disembodied) and
subsequently analyzed in the process of chance discovery.

Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

provides chances potentially significant to adopt new inferences and new actions), that otherwise will soon disappear, without being transmitted to other human beings. The
early human mind possessed two separated intelligences
for thinking about animals and people. Through the mediation of the material culture the modern human mind can
arrive to internally think about the new concept of animal
and people at the same time. But the new meaning occurred over there, in the external material world where the
mind picked up it.
Artefacts as external objects allowed humans to loosen and
cut those chains on our unorganized brains imposed by our
evolutionary past. Chains that always limited the brains
of other human beings, such as the Neandertals. Loosing
chains and securing ideas to external objects was also a way
to creatively re-organize brains as universal machines for
thinking.
I think the disembodiment of mind can nicely account for
low-level cognitive processes of chance production, bringing up the question of how could higher-level processes be
comprised and how would they interact with lower-level
ones. To the aim of explaining these higher-level mechanisms I have provided a cognitive framework where modelbased and manipulative abduction together with external
representations and epistemic mediators play a central role
(cf. the following sections).

3. Theoretical and Manipulative Reasoning

Science is one of the most explicitly constructed, abstract,
and creative forms of human knowledge. Today researchers
concentrated on the concept of abduction pointed out by
C.S. Peirce as a fundamental mechanism by which it is
possible to account for the introduction of new explanatory
hypotheses in science.
Abduction is the process of inferring certain facts and/or
laws and hypotheses that render some sentences plausible, that explain or discover some (eventually new) phenomenon or observation; it is the process of reasoning in
which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated.
There are two main epistemological meanings of the word
abduction (Magnani, 2001): 1) abduction that only generates plausible hypotheses (selective or creative) and
2) abduction considered as inference to the best explanation, which also evaluates hypotheses. An illustration
from the field of medical knowledge is represented by the
discovery of a new disease and the manifestations it causes
which can be considered as the result of a creative abductive inference. Therefore, creative abduction deals with
the whole field of the growth of scientific knowledge. This
is irrelevant in medical diagnosis where instead the task is
to select from an encyclopedia of pre-stored diagnostic

55

entities.
Theoretical abduction2 certainly illustrates much of what is
important in creative abductive reasoning, in humans and
in computational programs, but fails to account for many
cases of explanations occurring in science when the exploitation of environment is crucial. It fails to account for
those cases in which there is a kind of discovering through
doing, cases in which new and still unexpressed information is codified by means of manipulations of some external
objects (epistemic mediators). The concept of manipulative abduction3 captures a large part of scientific thinking
where the role of action is central, and where the features
of this action are implicit and hard to be elicited: action
can provide otherwise unavailable information that enables
the agent to solve problems by starting and by performing
a suitable abductive process of generation or selection of
hypotheses.
Many attempts have been made to model abduction by developing some formal tools in order to illustrate its computational properties and the relationships with the different forms of deductive reasoning (Bylander et al., 1991).
Some of the formal models of abductive reasoning are
based on the theory of the epistemic state of an agent
(Boutilier & Becher, 1995), where the epistemic state of
an individual is modeled as a consistent set of beliefs that
can change by expansion and contraction (belief revision
framework). These kinds of logical models are called sentential (Magnani, 2001).
They exclusively deal with selective abduction (diagnostic
reasoning)4 and relate to the idea of preserving consistency.
Exclusively considering the sentential view of abduction
does not enable us to say much about creative processes
in science, and, therefore, about the nomological and most
interesting creative aspects of abduction. It mainly refers to
the selective (diagnostic) and merely explanatory aspects
of reasoning and to the idea that abduction is mainly an
inference to the best explanation (Magnani, 2001).
2
Magnani (Magnani, 2001; Magnani, 2002) introduces the
concept of theoretical abduction. He maintains that there are two
kinds of theoretical abduction, sentential, related to logic and
to verbal/symbolic inferences, and model-based, related to the
exploitation of internalized models of diagrams, pictures, etc., cf.
below in this paper.
3
Manipulative abduction and epistemic mediators are introduced and illustrated in (Magnani, 2001).
4
As previously indicated, it is important to distinguish between selective (abduction that merely selects from an encyclopedia of pre-stored hypotheses), and creative abduction (abduction
that generates new hypotheses).

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Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

4. Internal, External, Hybrid Scenarios

If we want to provide a suitable framework for analyzing
the most interesting cases of conceptual changes in science
we do not have to limit ourselves to the sentential view of
theoretical abduction but we have to consider a broader inferential one: the model-based sides of creative abduction
(cf. below).
From Peirces philosophical point of view, all thinking is
in signs, and signs can be icons, indices or symbols. Moreover, all inference is a form of sign activity, where the word
sign includes feeling, image, conception, and other representation (Peirce, 1931 1958, 5.283), and, in Kantian
words, all synthetic forms of cognition. That is, a considerable part of the thinking activity is model-based. Of course
model-based reasoning acquires its peculiar creative relevance when embedded in abductive processes, so that we
can individuate a model-based abduction.
Hence we must think in terms of model-based abduction (and not in terms of sentential abduction) to explain
complex processes like scientific conceptual change. are
Different varieties of model-based abductions (Magnani,
1999) are related to high-level types of scientific conceptual change (Thagard, 1992). Following Nersessian (Nersessian, 1999), the term model-based reasoning is used to
indicate the construction and manipulation of various kinds
of representations, not mainly sentential and/or formal, but
mental and/or related to external mediators.
Manipulative abduction (Magnani, 2001) happens when
we are thinking through doing and not only, in a pragmatic
sense, about doing. So the idea of manipulative abduction
goes beyond the well-known role of experiments as capable of forming new scientific laws by means of the results
(the natures answers to the investigators question) they
present, or of merely playing a predictive role (in confirmation and in falsification). Manipulative abduction refers
to an extra-theoretical behavior that aims at creating communicable accounts of new experiences to integrate them
into previously existing systems of experimental and linguistic (theoretical) practices. The existence of this kind of
extra-theoretical cognitive behavior is also testified by the
many everyday situations in which humans are perfectly
able to perform very efficacious (and habitual) tasks without the immediate possibility of realizing their conceptual
explanation.
In the following section manipulative abduction will be
considered from the perspective of chance discovery. The
power of model-based reasoning and abduction (both theoretical and manipulative) mainly depends on their ability to
extract and render explicit a certain amount of important information, unexpressed at the level of available data. They
have a fundamental role in the process of transformation

of knowledge from its tacit to its explicit forms, and in the

subsequent elicitation and use of knowledge. It is in this
process that chance discovery, promotion, and production
is central. Let us describe how this happens in the case of
external model-based processes.
4.1. Building scenarios through manipulative
abduction
For example, in the simple case of the construction and examination of diagrams in elementary geometrical reasoning, specific experiments serve as states and the implied
operators are the manipulations and observations that transform one state into another. The geometrical outcome depends upon practices and specific sensory-motor activities
performed on a non-symbolic object, which acts as a dedicated external representational medium supporting the various operators at work. There is a kind of an epistemic
negotiation between the sensory framework of the problem
solver and the external reality of the diagram (Magnani,
2002). It is well-known that in the history of geometry
many researchers used internal mental imagery and mental representations of diagrams, but also self-generated diagrams (external) to help their thinking.
This process involves an external representation consisting
of written symbols and figures that for example are manipulated by hand. The cognitive system is not merely the
mind-brain of the person performing the geometrical task,
but the system consisting of the whole body (cognition is
embodied) of the person plus the external physical representation. In geometrical discovery the whole activity of
cognition is located in the system consisting of a human
together with diagrams.
An external representation can modify the kind of preexistent internal computation that a human agent uses to
reason about a problem: the Roman numeration system
eliminates, by means of the external signs, some of the
hardest parts of the addition, whereas the Arabic system
does the same in the case of the difficult computations
in multiplication. The capacity for inner reasoning and
thought results from the internalization of the originally external forms of representation (Zhang, 1997).
In the case of the external representations we can have
various objectified knowledge and structures (like physical
symbols - e.g. written symbols, and objects - e.g. threedimensional models, shapes and dimensions), but also external rules, relations, and constraints incorporated in physical situations (spatial relations of written digits, physical constraints in geometrical diagrams and abacuses) (see
(Zhang, 1997)). The external representations are contrasted
to the internal representations that consist in the knowledge
and the structure in memory, as propositions, productions,
schemas, neural networks, models, prototypes, images.

Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

The external representations are not merely memory aids:

they can give people access to knowledge and skills that are
unavailable to internal representations, help researchers to
easily identify aspects and to make further inferences, they
constrain the range of possible cognitive outcomes in a way
that some actions are allowed and others forbidden. They
increase the chance discoverability. The mind is limited
because of the restricted range of information processing,
the limited power of working memory and attention, the
limited speed of some learning and reasoning operations;
on the other hand the environment is intricate, because of
the huge amount of data, real time requirement, uncertainty
factors. The interplay between external environment and
internal representations lead to the creation of suitable scenarios we call call hybrid.
4.2. The extra-theoretical dimension of scenario
creation: templates of epistemic acting and
epistemic mediators
Peirce gives an interesting example of model-based abduction related to sense activity: A man can distinguish different textures of cloth by feeling: but not immediately, for
he requires to move fingers over the cloth, which shows
that he is obliged to compare sensations of one instant with
those of another (Peirce, 1931 1958, 5.221). This surely
suggests that abductive movements have also interesting
extra-theoretical characters and that there is a role in abductive reasoning for various kinds of manipulations of external objects. All knowing is inferring and inferring is not
instantaneous, it happens in a process that needs an activity of comparisons involving many kinds of models in a
more or less considerable lapse of time. All these considerations suggest, then, that there exist a creative form of
thinking through doing, 5 fundamental as much as the theoretical one: manipulative abduction (see (Magnani, 2001)
and (Magnani, 2002)). As already said manipulative abduction happens when we are thinking through doing and
not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing.
Various templates of manipulative behavior exhibit some
regularities. The activity of manipulating external things
and representations is highly conjectural and not immediately explanatory: these templates are hypotheses of behavior (creative or already cognitively present in the scientists mind-body system, and sometimes already applied)
that abductively enable a kind of epistemic doing. Hence,
some templates of action and manipulation can be selected
in the set of the ones available and pre-stored, others have
to be created for the first time to perform the most interesting creative cognitive accomplishments of manipulative
5
In this way the cognitive task is achieved on external representations used in lieu of internal ones. Here action performs an
epistemic and not a merely performatory role, relevant to abductive reasoning.

57

abduction.
Some common features of the tacit templates of manipulative abduction, that enable us to manipulate things and
experiments in science to extract chances are related to: 1.
sensibility towards the aspects of the phenomenon which
can be regarded as curious or anomalous; manipulations
have to be able to introduce potential inconsistencies in the
received knowledge and so to open new possible reasoning opportunities (Oersteds report of his well-known experiment about electromagnetism is devoted to describing
some anomalous aspects that did not depend on any particular theory of the nature of electricity and magnetism);
2. preliminary sensibility towards the dynamical character
of the phenomenon, and not to entities and their properties, common aim of manipulations is to practically reorder
the dynamic sequence of events into a static spatial one
that should promote a subsequent birds-eye view (narrative or visual-diagrammatic), fruitful for further outcomes;
3. referral to experimental manipulations that exploit artificial apparatus to free new possible stable and repeatable sources of information about hidden knowledge and
constraints (Davy set-up in term of an artifactual tower of
needles showed that magnetization was related to orientation and does not require physical contact); 4. various contingent ways of epistemic acting: looking from different
perspectives, checking the different information available,
comparing subsequent events, choosing, discarding, imaging further manipulations, re-ordering and changing relationships in the world by implicitly evaluating the usefulness of a new order (for instance, to help memory). As I
have illustrated more in detail in (Magnani et al., 2002)
The whole activity of manipulation is devoted to building various external epistemic mediators that function as
an enormous new source of information and knowledge.
Gooding (Gooding, 1990) refers to this kind of concrete
manipulative reasoning when he illustrates the role in science of the so-called construals that embody tacit inferences in procedures that are often apparatus and machine
based. The embodiment is of course an expert manipulation of objects in a highly constrained experimental environment, and is directed by abductive movements that imply the strategic application of old and new templates of
behavior mainly connected with extra-theoretical components, for instance emotional, esthetical, ethical, and economic.
The hypothetical character of construals is clear: they can
be developed to examine further chances, or discarded,
they are provisional creative organization of experience and
some of them become in their turn hypothetical interpretations of experience, that is more theory-oriented, their reference is gradually stabilized in terms of established observational practices. Step by step the new interpretation - that

58

Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

at the beginning is completely practice-laden - relates

to more theoretical modes of understanding (narrative,
visual, diagrammatic, symbolic, conceptual, simulative),
closer to the constructive effects of theoretical abduction.
When the reference is stabilized the effects of incommensurability with other stabilized observations can become
evident. But it is just the construal of certain phenomena
that can be shared by the sustainers of rival theories. Gooding (Gooding, 1990) shows how Davy and Faraday could
see the same attractive and repulsive actions at work in the
phenomena they respectively produced; their discourse and
practice as to the role of their construals of phenomena
clearly demonstrate they did not inhabit different, incommensurable worlds in some cases. Moreover, the experience is constructed, reconstructed, and distributed across a
social network of negotiations among the different scientists by means of construals.
The whole activity of manipulation is devoted to building
various external epistemic mediators 6 Any written procedure is a simple example of a cognitive mediating structure with possible cognitive aims, so mathematical symbols and diagrams: Language, cultural knowledge, mental models, arithmetic procedures, and rules of logic are all
mediating structures too. So are traffic lights, supermarkets
layouts, and the contexts we arrange for one anothers behavior. Mediating structures can be embodied in artifacts,
in ideas, in systems of social interactions [. . . ] (Hutchins,
1995, pp. 290291). that function as an enormous new
source of information and knowledge. Therefore, manipulative abduction represents a kind of redistribution of the
epistemic and cognitive effort to manage objects and information that cannot be immediately represented or found
internally (for example exploiting the resources of visual
imagery).7
From the point of view of everyday situations manipulative
abductive reasoning and epistemic mediators exhibit other
very interesting features critical to chance discovery: 1. action elaborates a simplification of the reasoning task and a
redistribution of effort across time, when we need to manipulate concrete things in order to understand structures
which are otherwise too abstract, or when we are in presence of redundant and unmanageable information; 2. action can be useful in presence of incomplete or inconsistent
information - not only from the perceptual point of view
- or of a diminished capacity to act upon the world: it is
6

This expression is derived from the cognitive anthropologist

Hutchins (see (Hutchins, 1995)), who coined the expression mediating structure to refer to various external tools that can be built
to cognitively help the activity of navigating in modern but also
in primitive settings.
7
It is difficult to preserve precise spatial and geometrical relationships using mental imagery, in many situations, especially
when one set of them has to be moved relative to another.

used to get more data to restore coherence and to improve

deficient knowledge; 3. action enables us to build external
artifactual models of task mechanisms instead of the corresponding internal ones, that are adequate to adapt the environment to the agents needs. 4. action as a control of sense
data illustrates how we can change the position of our body
(and/or of the external objects) and how to exploit various
kinds of prostheses (Galileos telescope, technological instruments and interfaces) to get various new kinds of stimulation: action provides some tactile and visual information
(e.g., in surgery), otherwise unavailable. The external artifactual models are endowed with functional properties as
components of a memory system crossing the boundary between person and environment (for example they are able
to transform the tasks involved in allowing simple manipulations that promote further visual inferences at the level
of model-based abduction). The cognitive process is distributed between a person (or a group of people) and external representation(s), and so obviously embedded and situated in a society and in a historical culture.8
As we have already stressed, the manipulations of external representations and mediators, together with the internal processes, aims at building what we have called hybrid
scenarios.

5. Conclusion
It is clear that the manipulation of external objects helps
human beings in chance discovery and production and so
in their creative tasks. I have illustrated the strategic role
played by low-level cases of disembodiment of mind also
relating it to the high-level cognitive processes of manipulative abduction, considered as a particular kind of abduction that exploits external models and epistemic mediators
endowed with delegated explanatory cognitive roles and attributes, surely active in scenario creation.

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Scenario Creation and the Disembodiment of Mind

59

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