**2. Cause of Low Production of Knowledge**

There is a great variety of problems related to the low production of knowledge in Venezuela, the most outstanding being:


**39**

*Divergent Abduction Model and Its Convergent Interaction in Knowledge Production*

group with the lowest number of patents per year.

to increase knowledge production in Venezuela.

that intervene in a basic model of knowledge generation.

sight, the best explanation or the most probable one.

an exceptionality persists so as not to fulfill the requirement of the title of doctor [4], which increases inefficiency and allows people to reach the highest levels of teaching without academic credentials. The experts in generating patents par excellence are the university professors, but if these do not fulfill their obligations, they do not possess the experience to support others, which

• It does not exist an orientation, models, or patterns adapted to our reality that supports the generation of knowledge, being tutors who should have a high level of expertise and experience in the subject of doctoral thesis, publication, incubation, prototypes, and patents and their inclusion in the application to solve problems. The different methodologies known worldwide are not giving real benefits in Venezuela, and both the level of scarcity of financial resources for research projects and low salaries become factors of low motivation; all the above is reflected in the world records which places Venezuela among the

Define a basic model of abduction and divergence interaction that allows systemically to model with the variables involved in a convergent sequential pattern

The research is based on a study and analysis of the information developed in other areas of knowledge and its application in the subject, to relate them to the dynamics over time of the problem and the generation of knowledge; starting from the use of a descriptive methodology, of deductive analysis with emulation of different sciences, the convergence and divergence engineering is established as a tool to model the scope of knowledge generation. The research begins by locating and studying the sources of information to subsequently analyze and interpret in a critical and separate way the ideas surrounding the topic, to relate them as variables

Abduction is a term from the Latin abductio and is composed of the words abs, from afar, and ducere, to carry. The movement by which a member or an organ moves away from the median plane divides the body in two symmetrical parts. "The abductor is the muscle that serves for abduction" is a type of reasoning that from the description of a fact or phenomenon offers or arrives at a hypothesis, which explains the possible reasons or reasons for the fact through the premises obtained. Charles Sanders Peirce calls it a conjecture [5]. That conjecture seeks to be, at first

Abductive thinking or reasoning is a type of reasoning that from a fact or phenomenon is reached a hypothesis, which explains the possible reasons or reasons for establishing a premise called conjecture. That conjecture seeks to be, at first sight, the best explanation or the most probable one. Aristotle investigated seductive reasoning in his First Analytics. According to Aristotle, abductive reasonings

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85152*

turns into a vicious circle.

**3. Objective**

**4. Methodology**

**5. Theoretical support**

*Divergent Abduction Model and Its Convergent Interaction in Knowledge Production DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85152*

an exceptionality persists so as not to fulfill the requirement of the title of doctor [4], which increases inefficiency and allows people to reach the highest levels of teaching without academic credentials. The experts in generating patents par excellence are the university professors, but if these do not fulfill their obligations, they do not possess the experience to support others, which turns into a vicious circle.

• It does not exist an orientation, models, or patterns adapted to our reality that supports the generation of knowledge, being tutors who should have a high level of expertise and experience in the subject of doctoral thesis, publication, incubation, prototypes, and patents and their inclusion in the application to solve problems. The different methodologies known worldwide are not giving real benefits in Venezuela, and both the level of scarcity of financial resources for research projects and low salaries become factors of low motivation; all the above is reflected in the world records which places Venezuela among the group with the lowest number of patents per year.

### **3. Objective**

*New Innovations in Engineering Education and Naval Engineering*

integrates both approaches in a single scheme is presented.

There is a great variety of problems related to the low production of knowledge

• The percentage of students who graduate from doctorates as a source of knowledge production is approximately 10% compared to the income, which defines that there is a low efficiency in this schooling in Venezuela; this oscillates between 0 and 15% per year, with a unique atypical value of a University with a 95% ratio of graduates of the total income. Everything is based on the information provided by the universities to the National Graduate Advisory Council [2]; the cause is known as everything except thesis [3], which means finishing school and doctoral thesis project, but it does not end with the delivery and

• The actors that are required to produce knowledge are university teachers, and they are not fulfilling their task. By law they are obliged to investigate and, also, to climb the ladder in the categories of associate and holder; they must have a doctorate, but, in the great majority of the universities of the country,

**2. Cause of Low Production of Knowledge**

in Venezuela, the most outstanding being:

public defense of the said thesis.

is mandatory in the doctorate; the rest of the Venezuelan legislation speaks and defines research but without involving it with patents, and, although there are universities that are generally responsible for educating and training researchers, only the doctoral thesis at the graduate level is developed with the aim of generating new knowledge. Additionally, in Venezuela, there is a National Universities Law published in Official Gazette N° 1.429 of September 8, 1970, in article 87 which establishes that they are ordinary members of teaching and research staff, instructors and assistant, aggregates, associates, and full professor, known as the ranking or location of teachers according to the merits and time spent on average of 4 years in each category. To ascend from one level to another in the universities is defined in article N° 89 which says: "The Ordinary members of the teaching and research staff will be located and will rise in the ranks according to their credentials or scientific merits and their years of services. To ascend from one category to another in the ranking, it will be necessary, in addition, to present for the consideration of a jury appointed for that purpose an original work as a credential of merit." The important thing of this article is that the work of promotion to ascend to the different levels of the ladder must be original; but as time went by and after 24 years, a modification to the Law of Universities published in Official Gazette No. 35, 708 of May 11, 1995, called Standards on the Teaching and Research Staff Scale of National Universities, and in article N° 5, it establishes: "The work of promotion required by the Law of Universities must be original, novel and untold published during the time in which the teacher remained in the previous ladder to which one aspires"; this article introduces and raises the requirement that, besides being original, must comply with being novel, which leads to new verifiable knowledge worldwide, and the unpublished is that it has not been published previously; the legislators seek to establish the obligatory nature of the ordinary teachers of the universities, to produce new knowledge on the frontier of science, which in practice is invention and innovation. After an analysis of the problematic, the most important of the writing is the divergent adductive model of n hypotheses, all with the same probability, where infinite conjectures of a fact or event are defined, and then from a convergent stepby-step process, look for the possible solution, and in the end, a general model that

**38**

Define a basic model of abduction and divergence interaction that allows systemically to model with the variables involved in a convergent sequential pattern to increase knowledge production in Venezuela.

### **4. Methodology**

The research is based on a study and analysis of the information developed in other areas of knowledge and its application in the subject, to relate them to the dynamics over time of the problem and the generation of knowledge; starting from the use of a descriptive methodology, of deductive analysis with emulation of different sciences, the convergence and divergence engineering is established as a tool to model the scope of knowledge generation. The research begins by locating and studying the sources of information to subsequently analyze and interpret in a critical and separate way the ideas surrounding the topic, to relate them as variables that intervene in a basic model of knowledge generation.

#### **5. Theoretical support**

Abduction is a term from the Latin abductio and is composed of the words abs, from afar, and ducere, to carry. The movement by which a member or an organ moves away from the median plane divides the body in two symmetrical parts. "The abductor is the muscle that serves for abduction" is a type of reasoning that from the description of a fact or phenomenon offers or arrives at a hypothesis, which explains the possible reasons or reasons for the fact through the premises obtained. Charles Sanders Peirce calls it a conjecture [5]. That conjecture seeks to be, at first sight, the best explanation or the most probable one.

Abductive thinking or reasoning is a type of reasoning that from a fact or phenomenon is reached a hypothesis, which explains the possible reasons or reasons for establishing a premise called conjecture. That conjecture seeks to be, at first sight, the best explanation or the most probable one. Aristotle investigated seductive reasoning in his First Analytics. According to Aristotle, abductive reasonings

are syllogisms where the premises only give a certain degree of probability to the conclusion. According to Peirce, abduction is something more than a syllogism: it is one of the three forms of reasoning together with deduction and induction. Charles S. Peirce (1903) [5] defines abduction: "Abduction is the process by which an explanatory hypothesis is formed, it is the only logical operation that introduces a new idea." Abduction can be understood as a form of logical inference. In abduction to understand a phenomenon, a rule that operates in the form of hypotheses is introduced to consider the possible result as a particular case within that rule; in other words, in the case of a deduction, a conclusion is obtained of a Premise "p," while abductive reasoning consists of explaining "c" by means of "p" considering p as explanatory hypothesis [6]. Abduction is characterized, then, as a creative process, as it generates the new ideas, while the deduction derives knowledge from the one that has already been validated previously, and the induction, for its part, is limited to checking it in. Abduction, allows the identification of indications to which something corresponds and the reasons for their appearance, from which a series of consequences can be extracted.

Divergence is a word that comes from Latin "divergens" which means divergent. It means action and effect of diverging, progressive separation of two or more lines or surfaces; diversity of disagreements, diversity of opinions, as an example we have in mathematics the divergence of a vector field on a surface and the infinite series that does not converge [7].

Divergent thinking: Throughout history there are many treaties that established the classification of productive thinking in two groups: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking is pointed by the authors as a generator of different solutions to a problem, in different directions, seeking the best; confronting the new and with a tendency to creativity and ingenuity, it has also been called lateral thought, by De Bono in 1970, as well as holistic thinking defined by Jan Smuts in 1927, in which the analysis is of the whole and not of its parts, including as a term "see the forest and not the tree." There is a mechanism associated with creativity, which is retrospective perception and intuition; according to the story, it is established that the great discoveries have been produced by changes of schemes through casual observations, accidents, errors, and humor. Rio Pérez, in 2002, characterized the creative thinking of an individual and related it to the intellectual structure of the subject, their characteristics, and their mental capacities [8]. At the beginning, human development focused on intelligence, knowledge, memory, and logical or convergent thinking, and, later, divergent production was incorporated [9]. The production of knowledge, in the first instance, is the interaction of vertical and lateral thought closely linked, where lateral thinking is the one that increases the efficiency of vertical thinking.

#### **6. Case study**

To define the case study, it is formulated in the Seminar on Management in Science and Technology, of the Doctorate of Management of Research and Development, during the academic periods of the second of 2011 to the first of 2014, with an average of seven students, belonging to the Area of Management of Research and Development, of the Commission of Postgraduate Studies of the UCV, to which a question was posed to the trainees: Is there a ticket on the floor? Unknown, what do you think about it? Do you formulate all the hypotheses related to the case? **Table 1** shows the relation of the number of students and the total of hypotheses that they managed to define for 5 min, which is an application of establishing premises when an event occurs, with a total of 40 curative participants during six semesters.

**41**

*Divergent Abduction Model and Its Convergent Interaction in Knowledge Production*

**People Hypothesis** 1 1 18 2 15 3 2 4 3 5 1 6

The challenge was to produce the greatest number of hypotheses; in many cases, the abductions are but the spontaneous conjectures of reason. In order for these hypotheses to emerge, the imagination and instinct must compete. Abduction is like a flash of understanding, a jump over the known; for abduction, it is necessary to leave the mind free. Based on the same events, then the students are illustrated with a variety of hypotheses of equal probability; out of a total of 100, there are at least

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85152*

35 equally likely assumptions and they are:

• It's false?

**Table 1.**

• Is the evil?

• Is it terror?

• Will it be paving?

*Relationship and participants responses.*

• What brought a bird?

• Will it be a student?

• Will it be a professor?

• Will they be filming?

• Will you have owner?

• Will it be embraced?

• Will it have poison?

• Will it have GPS?

• Will it have a bar code?

• Will you have intelligent chip?

• Is it good luck?

• Will it be a joke, with a hidden camera?

• Will it be a pump?

*Divergent Abduction Model and Its Convergent Interaction in Knowledge Production DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85152*


**Table 1.**

*New Innovations in Engineering Education and Naval Engineering*

series of consequences can be extracted.

that does not converge [7].

are syllogisms where the premises only give a certain degree of probability to the conclusion. According to Peirce, abduction is something more than a syllogism: it is one of the three forms of reasoning together with deduction and induction. Charles S. Peirce (1903) [5] defines abduction: "Abduction is the process by which an explanatory hypothesis is formed, it is the only logical operation that introduces a new idea." Abduction can be understood as a form of logical inference. In abduction to understand a phenomenon, a rule that operates in the form of hypotheses is introduced to consider the possible result as a particular case within that rule; in other words, in the case of a deduction, a conclusion is obtained of a Premise "p," while abductive reasoning consists of explaining "c" by means of "p" considering p as explanatory hypothesis [6]. Abduction is characterized, then, as a creative process, as it generates the new ideas, while the deduction derives knowledge from the one that has already been validated previously, and the induction, for its part, is limited to checking it in. Abduction, allows the identification of indications to which something corresponds and the reasons for their appearance, from which a

Divergence is a word that comes from Latin "divergens" which means divergent. It means action and effect of diverging, progressive separation of two or more lines or surfaces; diversity of disagreements, diversity of opinions, as an example we have in mathematics the divergence of a vector field on a surface and the infinite series

Divergent thinking: Throughout history there are many treaties that established the classification of productive thinking in two groups: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking is pointed by the authors as a generator of different solutions to a problem, in different directions, seeking the best; confronting the new and with a tendency to creativity and ingenuity, it has also been called lateral thought, by De Bono in 1970, as well as holistic thinking defined by Jan Smuts in 1927, in which the analysis is of the whole and not of its parts, including as a term "see the forest and not the tree." There is a mechanism associated with creativity, which is retrospective perception and intuition; according to the story, it is established that the great discoveries have been produced by changes of schemes through casual observations, accidents, errors, and humor. Rio Pérez, in 2002, characterized the creative thinking of an individual and related it to the intellectual structure of the subject, their characteristics, and their mental capacities [8]. At the beginning, human development focused on intelligence, knowledge, memory, and logical or convergent thinking, and, later, divergent production was incorporated [9]. The production of knowledge, in the first instance, is the interaction of vertical and lateral thought closely linked, where lateral

thinking is the one that increases the efficiency of vertical thinking.

To define the case study, it is formulated in the Seminar on Management in Science and Technology, of the Doctorate of Management of Research and Development, during the academic periods of the second of 2011 to the first of 2014, with an average of seven students, belonging to the Area of Management of Research and Development, of the Commission of Postgraduate Studies of the UCV, to which a question was posed to the trainees: Is there a ticket on the floor? Unknown, what do you think about it? Do you formulate all the hypotheses related to the case? **Table 1** shows the relation of the number of students and the total of hypotheses that they managed to define for 5 min, which is an application of establishing premises when an event occurs, with a total of 40 curative participants

**40**

**6. Case study**

during six semesters.

*Relationship and participants responses.*

The challenge was to produce the greatest number of hypotheses; in many cases, the abductions are but the spontaneous conjectures of reason. In order for these hypotheses to emerge, the imagination and instinct must compete. Abduction is like a flash of understanding, a jump over the known; for abduction, it is necessary to leave the mind free. Based on the same events, then the students are illustrated with a variety of hypotheses of equal probability; out of a total of 100, there are at least 35 equally likely assumptions and they are:

