Selene Arfini

The potential development of self-driving cars (also known as autonomous vehicles or AVs – particularly Level 5 AVs) has called the attention of different interested parties. Yet, there are still only a few relevant international regulations on them, no emergency patterns accepted by communities and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and no publicly accepted solutions to some of their pending ethical problems. Thus, this paper aims to provide some possible answers to these moral and practical dilemmas. In particular, we focus on what AVs should do in no-win scenarios and on who should be held responsible for these types of decisions. A naturalistic perspective on ethics informs our proposal, which, we argue, could represent a pragmatic and realistic solution to the regulation of AVs. We discuss the proposals already set out in the current literature regarding both policy-making strategies and theoretical accounts. In fact, we consider and reject descriptive approaches to the problem as well as the option of using either a strict deontological view or a solely utilitarian one to set AVs’ ethical choices. Instead, to provide concrete answers to AVs’ ethical problems, we examine three hierarchical levels of decision-making processes: country-wide regulations, OEM policies, and buyers’ moral attitudes. By appropriately distributing ethical decisions and considering their practical implications, we maintain that our proposal based on ethical naturalism recognizes the importance of all stakeholders and allows the most able of them to take actions (the OEMs and buyers) to reflect on the moral leeway and weight of their options.

How have online communities affected the ways their users construct, view, and define their identity? In this paper, we will approach this issue by considering two philosophical sets of problems related to personal identity: the “Characterization Question” and the “Self-Other Relations Question.” Since these queries have traditionally brought out different problems around the concept of identity, here we aim at rethinking them in the framework of online communities. To do so, we will adopt an externalist and cognitive point of view on online communities, describing them as virtual cognitive niches. We will evaluate and agree with the Attachment Theory of Identity, arguing that there is continuity between offline and online identity and that usually the latter contributes to the alteration of the former. Finally, we will discuss ways users can enact self-reflection on online frameworks, considering the impact of the Filter Bubble and the condition of Bad Faith.

This introductory chapter aims to present the prosperous area of research covered in these volumes, also providing a bird’s eye view of Lorenzo Magnani’s contribution to the philosophy of science and technology, epistemology, moral philosophy, and reflections on reasoning and cognition. This chapter will also explain the two-part division of the book, pointing out how abduction, scientific cognition, and eco-cognitive computationalism represent the focal points of many of its chapters. It will also address the problematic entanglement between these topics, found in the relevant current literature and Magnani’s work, and provide a framework to understand, without reducing in scope, the rich connections that are so definitely established.

This book, the first of two volumes, provides novel perspectives on the study of abduction, by analyzing both Magnani’s ample investigation of the subject and discussing its rising importance in today’s epistemology and philosophy of science. Notwithstanding the long history of the concept, which has been studied since its analysis in Aristotle’s Organon, in the last fifty years, it has known a resurgent interest in the epistemological literature since it is an ampliative inference deemed to be at the core of creative leaps and acts of discovery. For these reasons, different open questions still bother interested researchers: which constraints affect abductive reasoning when a hypothesis is evaluated or selected? Should we adopt a unified view on abduction or maintain a pluralistic perspective regarding its forms and functions? What kinds of models can be used in abductive reasoning? This last question, in particular, shows how the topics of the two parts of the volume are intrinsically connected and ensures they are of great importance to those interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, mathematical logic and AI.

This book, the second of two volumes, focuses on scientific cognition, computationalism, and scholars' reception of what Lorenzo Magnani named "eco-cognitive" views on the mind. The authors of these chapters address complex questions, which regard, in part, Magnani’s contributions in the field of model-based science, the role of inferential models in mathematics, the transformations and possible applicability of Charles Sanders Peirce’s and Immanuel Kant’s concepts and insight into current understanding of scientific progress, and the still unsolved questions regarding the methodological steps that take researchers to scientific discoveries. Some contributions also address the problematic understanding of artificial agents as "intelligent," how cognition can be discussed within the limits of computationalism, and how the eco-cognitive perspective on the mind also affects the conception of scientific reasoning and socially constructed phenomena. The book is of great interest to those interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, mathematical logic and AI.

Considering any democratic government, it goes without saying that the more knowledgeable the citizens are, the better the democratic process will work. Therefore, leveraging scientific information among laypeople is intuitively linked to the growth of an educated population; some factors, though, taint this positivist account. Amateurization as an explicit stance on the one hand, “edutainment” matched with the ever-growing complexity of scientific matters on the other. In this paper we argue that while encouraging the diffusion of a general “love for science” should inspire an appetite for more robust scientific knowledge, it also foster the emergence of problematic cognitive situations, as the propagation of the so-called epistemic bubbles or the progressive belittlement of the role of experts in society.

Serendipity is a concept that addresses a peculiar phenomenon in science: the act of finding or discovering something by chance or without looking for it. Since the beginning of this century, scholars have considered the convolute implications of serendipity, which have been at the center of an emerging area of research called Serendipity Science. One thing that has escaped scholarly attention is what serendipity offers us in terms of explanations. What kind of explanations does serendipity offer? And explanations of what? This article aims to answer these questions by focusing on the open problems related to serendipity and its capacity for explanation in science. In the first section, we will briefly discuss why serendipity appears problematic in the philosophy of science. In the second section, we will maintain that serendipity is a term that rightfully identifies at least two sets of explanatory reasoning: one that we have called the Prospective Explanation, given during the serendipitous process, and the Retrospective Explanation, which emerges only after the research is concluded. By discussing the difference between these two explanatory dynamics, we will illustrate that serendipity should be addressed by providing valuable information about why a discovery has emerged and how it is justified in the scientific context.

Selene Arfini seeks to resolve a long-standing paradoxParadox and the seemingly exclusive dichotomy between knowledgeKnowledgeand ignoranceIgnorance (also Aching Ignorance) through the concept of serendipity. How can we find new knowledgeKnowledge when we do not know what are we looking for? This question is a brief version of Meno’s or the Learner’s ParadoxParadox, which still manages to be upsetting in contemporary philosophy, despite having been discussed since Plato’s times. Arfini believes that the paradoxParadox still upsets because we strongly connect the explicit act of searching to the event of finding, in the same way as we describe the ideas of knowledgeKnowledge and ignorance as opposite and unrelated. Arfini argues that these assumptions live on, thanks to a cluster of misconceptions that still envelop the ideas of discoveryDiscovery (also, Scientific Discovery), which could be overcome by utilizing insights from recent studies in serendipity, and by reframing ignoranceIgnorance (also Aching Ignorance)from a cognitiveCognition, Cognitive (-offloading) (-trajectory) (-probatonics) perspective.

In this chapter, I will proceed to discuss the generation and maintenance of ignorance in the agent’s cognition as the product of a habit (in Peircean words) of thought and action. Indeed, “habit” is not an easy term in Peirce’s epistemology: on the one hand it often signifies the rule of action that is attained with the fixation of belief (Peirce 1998a); on the other hand, it also describes an almost instinctual process that determines further reasonings, the element “by virtue of which an idea gives rise to another” (Peirce 1958b, Vol. VII, Book II, p. 215). Stressing the apparently wide separation between these two traits of habit in the epistemic continuum between doubt and belief, I will illustrate: (a) a knowledge-based kind of habit and (b) an ignorance-based one. Both are necessary for the beginning of thought and are the roots of the ampliative reasoning condensed in another Peircean keyword: abduction.

In this chapter I will call attention to the role of ignorance in the processes of discovery by taking into account a model-based structure that exploits its tenacity: Thought Experiments (hereafter TEs). Presenting an account of TEs in relation to the ignorance-preservation feature, I will explain both their proficiency in boosting scientific and philosophical reasoning and their tendency to become objects of puzzlement and amazement for philosophers of science. In few words, I will claim that TEs reproduce extended conceptual metaphors, which instantiate forms of abductive reasoning. Therefore, they partially preserve the ignorance of the authors who produce them (even if they also enhance their knowledge), since TEs embed both forms of fallacious reasoning and limited Thought experiment(s) structure-mapping scenarios.

In this part I will examine the role played by ignorance in ampliative reasoning, discussing its function both in the disposition of human agents to discover new data, and in some inferential structures that dominate the scientific methodology. The tenacity of ignorance, displayed in some patterns of reasoning humans frequently apply, will be presented as a useful feature that the agents exploit in order to uncover new knowledge and to extend their epistemic horizons. In this chapter, in order to organize the argumentation around the topic of ampliative but fallible reasoning, I will briefly refer to the literature on fallacies, which are arguments and inferences that are triggered by ignorance and maintain it through the process, often without a conscious acknowledgment by the agents who conceive them. I will take into consideration the position of some authors who have argued in favor of a contextual reevaluation of fallacies as cognitive virtues (Magnani 2001; Bardone 2011; Woods 2013). By extending their thesis, I will argue that the tenacity of ignorance is the main reason for the cognitive virtues of fallacies.

In this chapter, by highlighting the role of abduction in the scientific methodology, I will proceed to describe the function of ignorance in its structure, deeming it as an invaluable resource for the performance of this kind of ampliative reasoning. Abduction can indeed be described as “the fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology”, as proposed by Hintikka (1998), for some good reasons. The high formal flexibility and cognitive salience of abduction vastly depend on the role that ignorance plays in its formulation: abduction indeed represents an ampliative inference that preserves the agent’s ignorance and also allows the expansion of the agent’s knowledge. Thus, I will distinguish between the preservation of ignorance implied in the selective model of abduction and an enhancement of knowledge through ignorance that is provided by the generation of a new hypothesis in the creative abduction. Furthermore, I will refer to the difference between selective and creative abduction to spell out two kinds of ignored possibilities that are relevant for chance-discovery, highlighting the importance of “understanding the meaning of an impending phenomenon as a chance” as a chance-discovery activity driven by the agent’s ignorance.

Ignorance: a word is still sufficient to describe one of the most troublesome problems of contemporary epistemology—without even mentioning its growing popularity outside the academic environment. The recent developments of the schools of thought called “epistemologies of ignorance” and “agnotology” have insisted on the necessity of a contextualization of ignorance, specifically, on the need to investigate the epistemological backgrounds that generate it and the analysis of information-sharing mechanisms that contribute to spread it in particular environments. In the words of Proctor and Schiebinger (2008, [p. i]) their goal is “to come to grips with how ignorance has been understood, created, and ignored, linking these ideas also to allied creations of secrecy, uncertainty, confusion, silence, absence, and impotence—especially as these pertain to scientific activities”.

As I previously argued, the concept of autoimmunity refers to the partial incapability of the human agent to distinguish between her knowledge and her ignorance, due to an involuntary mechanism which underlies the fixation and revision of beliefs. In this chapter I will contend that the new concept of “cognitive autoimmunity” can be usefully employed beyond the epistemological and logical fieldwork, in order to describe the cognitive mechanism supporting what the philosophical literature calls “epistemic feelings” (Muñoz 2013, 2014; Michaelian and Muñoz 2014). The cognitive autoimmunity of the agents will justify both the fact that a lot of instantiations of ignorance are bound not to be recognized by their owners, and the fact that philosophers have had an hard time trying to describe ignorance as a concept. Moreover, the cognitive autoimmunity will explain how the fugitive state of ignorance has an impact on the metacognitive capacity of the human cognition.

In this part I address the question: how does the fugitive nature of ignorance affect the cognitive and metacognitive capacity of the human agent? In order to consider both the cognitive and the epistemological implication of this question, in this chapter I present two epistemological and logical perspectives, which will be the theoretical viewpoints from which I orient my philosophical view: the Naturalization of Logic, initiated by Gabbay and Woods (2001) and the Eco-Cognitive Perspective in epistemology, originated and established by Magnani (2009). By carrying on the aim of these two currents, I introduce the topic of ignorance in the epistemological system they proposed, and I extend their fallibilist principles with a corollary regarding the incapacity of the agent of always recognizing her own ignorance. Then, I explain why ignorance should be considered more than just a lack of requisite propositional attitudes for the cognizer, but a cognitive state strictly related to the psychological and emotional status of the agent. By referring to Polanyi’s (1966) theory regarding the tacit dimension of knowledge, I discuss the necessity of recognizing a tacit dimension of ignorance as well as a manifested or visible form of it.

In the present chapter I will present the visible forms of ignorance and knowledge—belief and doubt—adopting the Peircian, and so pragmatic, perspective, by emphasizing their role as epistemic modifiers of behavior for the cognitive agent (Peirce 1998c). The psychological and emotional effect of belief and doubt will be relevant to recognize the role of ignorance and truth on our cognition. I will then describe and use Woods’s (2005) theory of epistemic bubble in order to explain how the defeasible mechanism of ignorance-detection impacts also the knowledge-recognition one. I will proceed presenting the ignorance bubble, which extensively explains how ignorance can be a fugitive state of human cognition. In consequence of that, I will introduce the concept of cognitive autoimmunity, which refers in general to the partial incapability of the human agent to distinguish between her knowledge and her ignorance, due to an involuntary mechanism which underlies the fixation and revision of beliefs.

This chapter aims at investigating how information-sharing mechanisms in online communities favor activities of ignorance distribution on their platforms, such as fake data, biased beliefs, and inaccurate statements. In brief, I claim that online communities provide more ways to connect the users to one another rather than to control the quality of the data they share and receive. This, in turn, diminishes the value of fact-checking mechanisms in online news-consumption. I also contend that while digital environments can stimulate the interest of groups of students and amateurs in scientific and political topics, the diffusion of false, poor, and un-validated data through digital media contributes to the formation of bubbles of shallow understanding in the digitally informed public. In brief, the present chapter is a philosophical research, embedded in the theoretical framework of the epistemologies of ignorance, that applies the virtual niche construction theory to the cognitive behavior of internet users, as it is described by the current psychological, sociological, and anthropological literature.

In this chapter I aim at presenting the argument of the third and final part of the dissertation. In this part I will discuss the social feature of ignorance, arguing that it is not solely a property of individuals, but it can be shared and rethought in a social dimension. In particular, I will argue that ignorance, like knowledge, is situated in the eco-cognitive environment of the epistemic agents and it can also be distributed among them by exploiting the functionality of context-based information-sharing mechanisms. Thus, by understanding how information and knowledge are distributed in specialized environments, we should be able to get a picture of how ignorance is equally shared in the same contexts. Therefore, to study ignorance distribution in epistemically rich contexts, I will employ cognitive niche theories, which deal with how knowledge and information are actively and passively shared among group of people. Finally, without bringing about some differentiations of forms of ignorance, I will describe some ways it can be socially distributed, as misinformation, covering beliefs, and taboos.

In order to explain how ignorance is diffused in online communities, which are sophisticated cognitive niches, in this chapter I aim at discussing their cognitive and epistemic features and at presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Specifically, I will describe virtual cognitive niches as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment, performed by human agents, to aid thinking and reasoning about two target domains, both in the real-world and in the virtual reality. Moreover, I will argue that they enable the users of online communities to build “imagined communities” (Anderson 1987) and to distribute particular sets of affordances—specifically what Nagy and Neff (2015) call “imagined affordances”, which are the combination of users’ perceptions, attitudes and expectations over the functionality of a particular technology.

“Habit” is not an easy term in Peirce’s epistemology: on the one hand it often signifies the rule of action that is attained with the fixation of belief (1877) [EP 1: 109–123]; on the another hand, it is also described as an almost instinctual process that determines further reasonings, the element “by virtue of which an idea gives rise to another” (1873) [CP 7.354]. Stressing the apparently wide separation between these two traits of habit in the epistemic continuum between doubt and belief, we will be able to illustrate (a) a knowledge-based kind of habit, for the analysis of which we will also exploit Gibson’s concept of “affordance” (1950), which also plays a pivotal role in the justification of the agent’s own beliefs; and (b) an ignorance-based kind of habit, which will be proved as necessary for the beginning of thought, and which is at the base of the ampliative reasoning, condensed in another Peircean key topic (often qualified as “instinctual” in his writings): abduction.

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: (a) how can the creation of a just imagined scenario become functional to either a scientific or a philosophical research? and (b) 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”? (Bishop in Philos Sci 66(4):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.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important, innovative, and possibly creative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR023), held on June 7–9, 2023 in Rome, Italy, the book addresses various intertwined topics ranging from the epistemology and applications of models also concerning the problem of knowledge production and scientific methodology (information visualization, experimental methods, and design) to the analysis of their role in cognition, decision-making, also with respect to social implications. The problem of model-based cognition is also illustrated taking advantage of recent results regarding problem-solving, abduction, and logic, paying attention to a critique of the dominant and received approaches, to the aim of fostering new discussions and stimulate new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the fields of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of the latest theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

In this article, we want to demonstrate how thoughts experiments (TEs) incorporate cognitive structures—abductive inferences as conceptual metaphors—that reliably underpin everyday thinking and are enhanced and rendered more effective in scientific and philosophical contexts. Indeed one might successfully rethink the inferential structure at the heart of thought experiment production as the application of a generative abductive procedure. We shall characterize TES as possessing two characteristics that are essential to the definitions of abductive and metaphorical thinking, but when considered in relation to TE’s description, can excuse mild bewilderment: both knowledge-enhancing and ignorance-preserving features. In sum, we will say that TEs realize extended conceptual metaphors, which instantiate forms of abductive reasoning and, therefore, partially preserve the ignorance of the authors who produce them (even if they also increase a bit their knowledge by—so to speak—mitigating ignorance). In certain fortunate and exceptional instances, however, TEs can also provide a purely knowledge-enhancing benefit; in order to do this, a reference to the innovative and creative function of thought experiments in Galileo’s findings is also included.

In this paper, we will re-elaborate the notions of filter bubble and of echo chamber by considering human cognitive systems’ limitations in everyday interactions and how they experience digital technologies. Researchers who applied the concept of filter bubble and echo chambers in empirical investigations see them as forms of algorithmically-caused systems that seclude the users of digital technologies from viewpoints and opinions that oppose theirs. However, a significant majority of empirical research has shown that users do find and interact with opposing views. Furthermore, we argue that the notion of filter bubble overestimates the social impact of digital technologies in explaining social and political developments without considering the not-only-technological circumstances of online behavior and interaction. This provides us with motivation to reconsider this notion’s validity and re-elaborate it in light of existing epistemological theories that deal with the discomfort people experience when dealing with what they do not know. Therefore, we will survey a series of philosophical reflections regarding the epistemic limitations of human cognitive systems. In particular, we will discuss how knowledge and mere belief are phenomenologically indistinguishable and how people’s experience of having their beliefs challenged is cause of epistemic discomfort. We will then go on to argue, in contrast with Pariser’s assumptions, that digital media users might tend to conform to their held viewpoints because of the “immediate” way they experience opposing viewpoints. Since online people experience others and their viewpoints as material features of digital environments, we maintain that this modality of confronting oneself with contrasting opinions prompts users to reinforce their preexisting beliefs and attitudes.