Jeopardizing Biomedical Creative Abduction Through Impoverished Epistemic Niches

Abstract In this article the problem of discoverability and abductive creativity in scientific cognition will be characterized by the analysis of current difficulties that affect various aspects of the scientific enterprise such as in the case of the organization of Research and Development in biopharmaceutical companies. I will contend that this case symbolizes a paradigmatic example of what I have called “impoverished epistemic niches” in which it seems that some of the fundamental aspects that qualify modern science are jeopardized. To refer to some recent challenges to the crucial role played in scientific abductive cognition by the so-called “maximization of eco-cognitive openness” and “optimization of eco-cognitive situatedness”, I will propose the new concept of “ epistemic irresponsibility ”. I will emphasize the importance of the so-called knowledge in motion – in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary scientific research: the concept of knowledge in motion is also the necessary conceptual premise of the analysis of various kinds of epistemic irresponsibility. I indeed will illustrate the current increasing expansion of commodification and commercialization of science, marketing of technoscientific products, impoverishment of the epistemic niches, showing that a consequence is and could further be an attack to the possibility of a further flourishing of human fecund and successful abductive creative cognition in science, and so at the same time human creativity severely compromised.