Selene Arfini

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that frames our analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews.

The broad aim of this paper is to question the ambiguous relationship between technology and intelligence. More specifically, it addresses the reasons why the ever-increasing reliance on smart technologies and wide repositories of data does not necessarily increase the display of “smart” or even “intelligent” behaviors, but rather increases new instances of “brutality” as a mix of ignorance and violence. We claim that the answer can be found in the cyborg theory, and more specifically in the possibility to blend different kinds of intentionality.

During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discovery, the philosophical literature has hardly paid attention to the cognitive significance of serendipity, accepting rather than examining some of its most specific features, such as its game-changing effect, the unexpectedness of its occurrence, and its affinity with the concept of “luck”. Thus, in this paper we aim at analyzing these characteristics in the light of their cognitive implications in the recognition, performance, and possible stimulation of serendipitous events in relation to scientific discoveries.

In this paper, we aim at explaining the relevance of thought experiments in philosophy and the history of science by describing them as particular instances of two categories of creative thinking: metaphorical reasoning and abductive cognition. As a result of this definition, we will claim that TEs hold an ignorance-preserving trait that is evidenced in both TEs inferential structure and in the process of scenario creation they presuppose. Elaborating this thesis will allow us to explain the wonder that philosophers of science have consistently shown for TEs, as well as the high functionality of TEs in the creative aspects of scientific and philosophical praxis.

In this paper we aim at discussing cognitive and epistemic features of online communities, by the use of cognitive niche constructions theories, presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Virtual cognitive niches can be considered as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment performed by agents to aid thinking and reasoning about some target domain. Discussing this definition, we will also consider how online communities, as networks displaying a social bias, can both foster civic awareness and promote problematic group-led behaviors in the virtually aggregated crowds. To support this affirmation, we will take into account the use of online communication networks during crises and we will argue that it can lead to ethically dubious consequences.

Ignorance is easily representable as a cognitive property of more than just individual subjects: groups, crowds, and even populations can share the same ignorance regarding particular concepts and ideas. Nevertheless, according to some theories that refer to the extension, distribution, and situatedness of human cognition, ignorance is hardly a state that can be extended, distributed, and situated in the same way in which knowledge is in our eco-cognitive environment. In order to understand how these contradictory takes can come across in a coherent description of ignorance, in this paper I aim at analyzing the impact of the agent’s ignorance in her ecological and cognitive environment, as well as the effect that the surrounding context has on the agent’s epistemological successes and downfalls. To this end I will adopt the cognitive and empirically sensitive perspectives of the distributed cognition, the extended mind and cognitive niches construction theories, which will help me address and answer three topical questions: (a) adopting the theories about the extended mind, the distributed cognition, and the cognitive significance of affordances can we describe ignorance as extended and distributed in spaces, artifacts, and other people? (b) extending or distributing ignorance in one’s eco-cognitive environment has the same cognitive and ecological impact of extending or distributing knowledge? (c) can we recognize instantiations of externalized or distributed ignorance? I will argue that by acknowledging the extended, distributed, and situated dimension of ignorance in cognitive niches we could recognize the impact that our ignorance and uncertainty has on how we manipulate and organize our environment and also how our eco-cognitive frameworks affect the perception of our epistemological states.

In this paper I aim at examining the use of model-based reasoning for the evaluation of particular explanatory theories: Conspiracy Theories. In the first part of the paper I will take into account the epistemological relevance of Conspiracy Theories: I will discuss their explanatory reach and I will propose that they give their believers the illusion of understanding complex socio-political phenomena. In the second part of the paper I will examine two traditional questions regarding Conspiracy Theories brought forward by the epistemological literature: can Conspiracy Theories ever describe possible conspiracies? Are they in principle non-credible? I will argue that these questions bring forward an epistemic and ontological paradox: if a Malevolent Global Conspiracy (term coined by (Basham 2003)) actually existed, there would be no Conspiracy Theory about it, and if a Conspiracy Theory brings forward details about the existence of a Malevolent Global Conspiracy, there is probably no such conspiracy. I will also specifically address the epistemological issues of discussing the definition of Conspiracy Theories by considering them explanations that brings out the Illusion of Depth of Understanding (term coined by (Ylikosky 2009)) and, with this concept, I will also give reasons to justify their cognitive appeal in the eyes of the lay public.

This book offers a comprehensive philosophical investigation of ignorance. Using a set of cognitive tools and models, it discusses features that can describe a state of ignorance if linked to a particular type of cognition affecting the agent’s social behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity. The author defines ignorance as a cognitive condition that can be either passively borne by an agent or actively nurtured by him or her, and a condition that entails epistemic limitations that affect the agent’s behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity. The author subsequently describes the ephemeral nature of ignorance, its tenacity in the development of human inferential and cognitive performance, and the possibility of sharing ignorance among human agents within the social dimension. By combining previous frameworks such as the naturalization of logic, the eco-cognitive perspective in philosophy and concepts from Peircean epistemology, and adding original ideas derived from the author’s own research and reflections, the book develops a new cognitive framework to help understand the nature of ignorance and its influence on the human condition.

In this paper we address the classical but still pending question regarding Thought Experiments: how can an imagined scenario bring new information or insight about the actual world? Our claim is that this general problem actually embraces two distinct questions: how can the creation of a just imagined scenario become functional to either a scientific or a philosophical research? and how can Thought Experiments hold a strong inferential power if their structures “do not seem to translate easily into standard forms of deduction or induction”? :534–541, 1999). We contend that, in order to answer both questions, we should consider the relation between the creation of the imagined scenario and the inferential power of Thought Experiments. Specifically, we will analyze Thought Experiments from an eco-cognitive point of view as goal-oriented objects, explaining their inferential power considering their generation as the result of abductive cognition and the construction of an imagined scenario as a process of scientific modeling. This will lead us to consider the creation of a Thought Experiment as a case of sophisticated model-based abduction.