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Abductive Ruses: The Role of Conjectures in the Epistemology of Deception from High-Level, Reflective Cases to Low-Level, Perceptual Ones

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Handbook of Abductive Cognition

Abstract

Deception is a complex phenomenon which has been investigated from various perspectives in different disciplines. From an epistemological standpoint, it is undisputed that abductive inferential processes of the deceived play a role in some cases of deception. So far, the literature of the epistemology of deception has only considered cases involving representational and propositional hypotheses. In recent times, various scholars have proposed a pluralistic ontology of hypotheses: they need not be propositional and representational mental entities, but can also take the form of low-level, sensorimotor conjectures. If these scholars are right, epistemological accounts of deception elaborated so far, by not considering instances of deception involving sensorimotor conjectures, have had too narrow of a focus. In this chapter, previous works on the relation of deception and abductive reasoning are presented, and contemporary proposals for pluralistic approaches to the ontology of hypotheses are examined. Building on these approaches, cases of sensorimotor conjectures in deception are considered, and the paradigmatic example of “feints” in sport performances is discussed. Finally, the concept of abductive ruse is presented to denote the various kinds of epistemological dynamics involved in deception, independently of whether the kinds of hypotheses generated are representational or sensorimotor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Training Group ‘Situated Cognition’, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany

    Francesco Fanti Rovetta

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  1. Francesco Fanti Rovetta
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Correspondence to Francesco Fanti Rovetta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Lorenzo Magnani

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  1. Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Samuel Forsythe

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Fanti Rovetta, F. (2022). Abductive Ruses: The Role of Conjectures in the Epistemology of Deception from High-Level, Reflective Cases to Low-Level, Perceptual Ones. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_31-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_31-1

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