Abduction as “leading away”. Aristotle, Peirce, and the importance of eco-cognitive openness and situatedness

In this article I will take advantage of the logical and
cognitive studies I have illustrated in my recent book emph{The
Abductive Structure of Scientific Creativity. An Essay on the
Ecology of Cognition} (2017), in which the process of building new
hypotheses is clarified thanks to my emph{eco-cognitive model}
(EC-Model) of abduction. Also resorting to a new interpretation of
Aristotle's seminal work on abduction, I will emphasize the crucial
role played in abductive cognition by the so-called ``optimization
of eco-cognitive openness and situatedness''. Hence, we can gain a new positive perspective
about the ``constitutive'' eco-cognitive character of abduction,
just thanks to Aristotle himself. I also contend
than a disregarded issue concerning abduction is related to the
current lack of knowledge about what I call ``discoverability'' and
``diagnosticability''. In the formula above $Vdash_L^X$ indicates
that inputs an outputs do not stand each other in an expected
relation and that the modification of the inputs $?_I$ can provide
the emph{abductive solution}. In general, in this characterization
the direction is not from evidence/premises to abductive result but
the forward fashion is adopted, where the inferential parameter
$Vdash$ sets some appropriate logical relationship between an input
which consists in both the abductive guess to be found and a
background theory (or just some premisses), and an output -- for
example an evidence, a novel phenomenon to be abductively
``explained'' through facts, rules, or even new theories. Further,
in the case of scientific settings, this optimality is made possible
by a maximization of changeability of both input and output: not
only inputs have to be enriched with the possible solution but, to
do that, other inputs have usually to be changed and/or modified.
This changeability first of all refers to a wide epistemological
openness.