Is Instinct Rational? Are Animals Intelligent? An Abductive Account

The concept of abduction can be useful to clarify the conflict instinct vs. inference in cognitive science. The resulting idea that abduction is partly explicable as a biological instinctual phenomenon and partly as a more or less “logical” operation related to “plastic” cognitive endowments of all organisms naturally leads to stress that many animals – traditionally considered “mindless” organisms – make up a series of signs and are engaged in making, manifesting or reacting to a series of signs. Through this semiotic activity – which is considerably model-based – they are at the same time engaged in “being cognitive agents” and therefore in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity is a continuous process of “hypothesis generation” that can be seen at the level of both instinctual behavior, as a kind of “hardwired” cognition, and representation-oriented behavior, where nonlinguistic pseudothoughts drive a plastic model-based cognitive role. Another important character of the abductive modelbased cognitive activity above is the externalization of artifacts that play the role of mediators in animal languageless “thinking”. That is, the interplay between internal and external representations exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underlying the semiotic emergence of abductive processes in important areas of model-based thinking of mindless organisms.