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 gr

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ethics.ai (3 August 2026), “Abduction Without a Body? Representational Grounding and the Abduction Loop for Scientific Hypothesis Generation,” evidence record 16090, https://ethics.ai/record/16090 (originally published by arXiv cs.AI).

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