Razón ampliada, abducción y creatividad musical

Abstract

The kantian idea of a “widened reason” (Erweitert Vernunft), from theCritique of the Power of Judgment (cfr. Kant, 1992), falls beyond the pure reason and grounds in the exercising of free imagination — which it is not bound to schemata and has endless interpretations whose representations (to whom no concept belongs) are symbolic— bear a likeness with the later thesis by Peirce on creative reason and abduction. We will show how this later development in epistemology received its first influences from an aesthetic theory and implied a broader frame than the scientific one, situation here vindicated. In his VII Lecture, “Pragmatism and Abduction”, from 1903, Peirce presents the perceptual interpretative judgment as an extreme of abductive inference, assuming any delimitation between them is difficult to demarcate (Peirce, 2015). Also, we will get back from the inverted path (from epistemology to aesthetics) to bring new findings: through the connection between abduction and epistemic change (cfr. Gärdenfors, 1988 and Aliseda, 2014) we will offer some conclusions on the widening-cognitive aspects specifically underlying musical creativity, the pinnacle of free imagination in Kantian theory, although there still devalued.