Abstract
In 2005, Woods described the epistemic bubble as an immunized state of human cognition that compromises the awareness of the agent about her beliefs and knowledge. The idea of an immunized knower swung with the proposal advanced by Gabbay and Woods of constructing a practical logic and epistemology, which can actually define itself as agent-centered, goal-oriented, and resource-bound. In order to carry out this project, in this paper we will introduce a symmetrical view on the agent immunization, focused on the agent’s missing awareness of her ignorance, also highlighting the importance of considering the actual agent as cogently ignorant, too. Eventually, we will formulate an idea of ignorance that can be fruitfully studied in the newborn field of naturalized epistemology and logic.
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Notes
- 1.
Woods’ “empirically sensitive” logic refers to the construction of logical systems able to take advantage of the results of cognitive science and its empirical results. The relevance of the “empirically aware” character refers to the importance attributed to the study of actual human cognition. As they say by “adjusting its [the logic] provisions to the cognitive natures of real life reasoning agents” (Woods 2013).
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- 3.
Third way reasoning is “the reasoning which, when good, is made so by circumstances other than deductive validity or inductive strength” (Woods 2013, p. 32) humans actually performs.
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- 5.
Cf. Magnani (2015).
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- 7.
Ambiguity, vagueness, and credibility in the field of informal logic and critical thinking are illustrated in the last edition of Critical Thinkings, by Moore and Parker (2012) and in a seminal article about the distinction between denotational ambiguity and vagueness, (Dunbar 2008). Cf. also the classical work of Grice on implicatures (Grice 1975).
- 8.
The Actually Happens Rule suggests to investigate the epistemic status of an ordinary agent instead of studying the impeccability of an ideal one—hence studying what actually happens. To be precise, the rule claims: “To see what agents should do, look first to what they actually do. Then repair the account if there is particular reason to do so” (Woods 2005, p. 734).
- 9.
Speaking of belief as the condition for knowledge we do not assume that there is no possibility of having a form of knowledge that the agent is not fully aware of [as Polanyi named it, a “tacit” form of knowledge (Polanyi 1966)]. Simply, in order to deal with the Naturalization of Logic and its paradigms, we prefer to use a stronger meaning than a broad sense of knowledge, speaking of it as the conscious attainment of reliable sentences or propositions.
- 10.
Here, thanks to Gigerenzer’s formula, (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we are in general referring to the cognitive virtues of heuristic reasoning and fallacies, analyzed by informal logic, psychology, and cognitive science in the past forty years, cf., for example, (Gigerenzer and Goldstein 1996; Woods 2007; Ippoliti 2015; Magnani 2014).
- 11.
The broad architecture of the cognitive bubble defined by Magnani (2011) frames how, in certain respects, human cognitive mechanisms need develop some autoimmune devices, or become to some extents self-blind. The “moral bubble” (Magnani 2011) captures how people, in order to engage any kind of moral behavior (typically involving punishment), must become blind and autoimmune to the possible violence they perform. While the epistemic bubble is typically conceived as a cognitive constraint of the single individual as it portrays a single agent’s cognitive structure, other kinds of embubblement are more or less prone to be culturally shared. The “religious bubble”—investigated in Magnani and Bertolotti (2011)—describes how the typical cognitive praxis of religious beliefs involves their enactment in certain social situations, for instance moral, spiritual, rhetorical, but their are deactivated when other kinds of decision or expectations are at stake (e.g. practical expectations in hunting, administering one’s resources, and so on).
- 12.
The advantages of being unaware of the fallibility of our cognition is also recalled in the Proposition 6.1a and Corollary, and 6.1b, in Woods (2013): “[Proposition 6.1.a] It is sometimes reasonable to use procedures that lead to error. Blanket error avoidance is not, therefore, a general condition on cognitive success. [...] [Corollary] There is cognitive good to be achieved by the engagement of cognitive procedures that let us down with notable frequency. Such letdowns are occasion to learn from experience. They are fruitful contexts for trial by error. [...] [Proposition 61b] By and large, individuals have speedy and reliable feedback mechanisms” (Woods 2013, p. 185). The employment of error-permitting heuristics, especially in situations of cognitive economy (that is when the production and distribution of knowledge in the agent’s environment is subject to some constraints—for short, everyday situations), renders the agent able (1) to try different patterns of reasoning in problem-solving processes and, (2) to learn from mistakes if and when they occur. Hence, since these useful heuristics are often fast to adopt and the errors easy to spot, they provide a clear knowledge-enhancement effect. Moreover, the exploitation of error-correcting and damage-managing strategies is considered cheaper and more productive in the temporal extended dimension than the adoption of totally error-free methods.
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Arfini, S., Magnani, L. (2015). An Eco-Cognitive Model of Ignorance Immunization . In: Magnani, L., Li, P., Park, W. (eds) Philosophy and Cognitive Science II. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18479-1_4
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