On the Origin of Abstraction : Real and Imaginary Parts of Decidability-Making

International audienceThe behavioral tradition has largely anchored on Simon's early conception of bounded rationality, it is important to engage more explicitly cognitive approaches particularly ones that might link to the issue of identifying novel competitive positions. The purpose of the study is to describe the cognitive processes by which decision-makers manage to work, individually or collectively, through undecidable situations and design innovatively. Most widespread models of rationality developed for preference-making and based on a real dimension should be extended for abstraction-making by adding a visible imaginary one. A development of a core analytical/conceptual apparatus is proposed to purposely account this dual form of reasoning, deductive to prove (then make) equivalence and abstractive to represent (then unmake) it. Complex numbers, comfortable to describe repetitive, expansional and superimposing phenomena (like waves, envelope of waves, interferences or holograms, etc.) appear as generalizable to cognitive processes at work when redesigning a decidable space by abstraction (like relief vision to design a missing depth dimension, Loyd's problem to design a missing degree of freedom, etc.). This theoretical breakthrough may open up vistas capacity in the fields of information systems, knowledge and decision