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14Impasse-Driven problem solving: The multidimensional nature of feeling stuckCognition 246 (C): 105746. 2024.
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67Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles and Echo ChambersPhilosophy and Technology 35 (1): 1-34. 2022.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 …Read more
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36Language: The “Ultimate Artifact” to Build, Develop, and Update WorldviewsTopoi 41 (3): 461-470. 2022.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 viewpoi…Read more
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10Serendipity and Ignorance StudiesIn Samantha Copeland, Wendy Ross & Martin Sand (eds.), Serendipity Science: An Emerging Field and its Methods, Springer Verlag. pp. 2147483647-2147483647. 2023.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 …Read more
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16Of Cyborgs and Brutes: Technology-Inherited Violence and IgnorancePhilosophies 2 (1): 1--14. 2016.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 pos…Read more
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35Online Identity Crisis Identity Issues in Online CommunitiesMinds and Machines 31 (1): 193-212. 2021.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 ex…Read more
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36The Antinomies of Serendipity How to Cognitively Frame Serendipity for Scientific DiscoveriesTopoi 39 (4): 939-948. 2020.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 …Read more
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39Ignorance-Preserving Mental Models Thought Experiments as Abductive MetaphorsFoundations of Science 24 (2): 391-409. 2019.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 won…Read more
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54Ethics of Self-driving Cars: A Naturalistic ApproachMinds and Machines 32 (4): 717-734. 2022.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 practi…Read more
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The expert you are (not) : citizens, experts and the limits of science communicationIn Pierluigi Barrotta & Giovanni Scarafile (eds.), Science and democracy: controversies and conflicts, John Benjamins. 2018.
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66Online communities as virtual cognitive nichesSynthese 196 (1): 377-397. 2019.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 disp…Read more
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30Introduction: knowing the unknown: Philosophical perspectives on ignoranceSynthese 199 (1): 689-693. 2020.
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19Situated ignorance: the distribution and extension of ignorance in cognitive nichesSynthese 198 (5): 4079-4095. 2019.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 …Read more
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14Ignorant Cognition: A Response to Copeland, Ervas, and Osta-Vélez (review)Studies in Philosophy and Education 40 (2): 237-241. 2021.
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The Logic of Dangerous ModelsIn Matthieu Fontaine, Cristina Barés-Gómez, Francisco Salguero-Lamillar, Lorenzo Magnani & Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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25Ignorant Cognition: A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-KnowingSpringer Verlag. 2019.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 affe…Read more
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16Thought Experiments as Model-Based AbductionsIn Lorenzo Magnani & Claudia Casadio (eds.), Model Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Logical, Epistemological, and Cognitive Issues, Springer International Publishing. 2006.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 …Read more
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28Cognitive autoimmunity knowledge, ignorance and self-deceptionLogic Journal of the IGPL 24 (1). 2016.
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An Eco-Cognitive Model of Ignorance ImmunizationIn Woosuk Park, Ping Li & Lorenzo Magnani (eds.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science Ii: Western & Eastern Studies, Springer Verlag. 2015.
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Universita' degli Studi di PaviaResearcher
Università degli Studi di Chieti
Department of Philosophical, Pedagogical and Economic-Quantitative Sciences
PhD, 2018
Pavia, Lombardia, Italy
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |