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 – intelligently make up a series of signs and are engaged in making, manifesting or reacting to a series of signs. 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 model-based cognitive activity above is the externalization of artifacts that play the role of mediators in animal languageless “thinking”.