Playing with anticipations as abductions. Strategic reasoning in an eco-cognitive perspective

In my opinion, it is only in the framework of a study concerning abductive inference that we can correctly and usefully grasp the cognitive status of reasoning strategies and related heuristics. To this aim, taking advantage of my eco-cognitive model (EC-model) of abduction, I will analyze strategic reasoning in the perspective of the so-called fill-up and cutdown problems, which characterize abductive cognition. I will also illustrate the abductive character of the concept of anticipation linking it to the cognitive problem of spatiality and of the genesis of space in the description of the abductive role of the Abschattungen (adumbrations), as they are described in the framework of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Anticipations share various features with visual and manipulative abduction and prove to be a useful tool to favor the characterization of the two kinds of strategic reasoning I am introducing in this article: locked and unlocked abductive strategies. The role of these different cognitive strategies, active both in humans and in computational machines, is also intertwined with the production of different kinds of cognitive hypothetical results, which range from poor to rich level of knowledge creativity. Differences that also have important consequences when we have to deal with computational AI programs devoted to perform the various types of abductive reasoning.