Abstract
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.
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Notes
A way to look into the extended mind paradigm is assuming that it describes causal conditions under which cognitive activities arise. If we look closely at the necessary bond between brain and body, few questions naturally pop up: where, the cognitive activities once arisen, do they abide? In the dynamic cluster of brain, body and world? Does the dynamic cluster include muscle memory, for example? Are muscles in a state of knowing? And if so what would it take for a memory-muscle to be in the cognitive state of ignorance? When it forgets? These questions, that regard the near field of embodied cognition (Varela 1991; Dourish 2001; Garbarini and Adenzato 2004) and if it could be considered knowledge-based by default as the extended mind is, are terribly interesting. They do pertain the relationship between brain and body more than how brain and body interact with the external world for the emergence of cognitive activities. To be fair, even if these questions present relevant issues that should be discussed for the introduction of ignorance in the philosophical sector of cognitive studies, I believe they could open a long detour in this paper, which more precisely aims at introducing the concept of ignorance in the discussion of how human agents cognitively interact with and are shaped by the external environment. Nonetheless, the investigation of how ignorance can be understood in the way embodied cognition is structured remains a question for further research.
Since the word “constructivist” is very ambiguous in philosophy I believe I should add a brief explicative note on my use of the term here. By using the word “constructivist” in this paper I refer to the framework of the cognitive niche construction theories, which are often neatly distinguished from more general cognitive niche theories. Cf. (Bertolotti and Magnani 2017).
Gibson never referred to the concept of “cognitive niches”, but instead exploited the ecological—and more general—idea of “niches”. In this paper I will use the Gibsonian take on niches to also address features of the structure and construction of cognitive niches, because I believe that the idea of a niche as a set of affodances (as it will be further discuss) could be usefully applied and extended to cognitive niches. Nonetheless, it would be deceiving to suggest that this was Gibson’s original thesis.
To be precise regarding the concept of epistemic bubble, I need to mention the fact that the interpretation of it that I give here is more concerned with its psychological and cognitive implications than epistemological ones—which differentiates the perspective that lets me consider the possibility of sharing an epistemic bubble from the point of view from which the concept originated. The core assumption is that, atone and the same time, it is causally impossible to be in a belief-embracing state and an error-correcting state with respect to some proposition p. This gives us two potential ways to analyze the situation. First, this allows fallibilism to be known to be true by a p-embracing believer without serving as a reason to resist belief. It is also part of this reading that when a fallibilist is in an error-correcting state of mind with respect to p, he is in the same kind of embubbled conditions as the error-maker. When embubbled Smith tells Zach that p, and Zach thereby is caused to believe it, Zach is now in a bubbled state with respect p. It is clear enough that that Smith and Zach now share a belief. From this perspective, it seems not so clear that Zach’s bubble is also Smith’s own; that is, that belief-sharing is bubble-sharing. On a different perspective, the fact that it is causally impossible to be in a belief-embracing state and an error-correcting state with respect to some proposition p, gives reason to state that when in a belief-embracing state, the agent is confident regarding the correctness of that belief. If not entirely confident regarding it, at least more than when in a error-correcting state regarding it. This confidence gives the cognitive agent reasons to act upon what believing that p suggests. So, sharing that belief, and sharing the same confidence regarding its correctness, would mean sharing the same reasons to act upon what the belief that p suggests. In this interpretation of the epistemic bubble, when discussing the possibility of sharing it, I do not suggest that the two bubbles have to be identical from an epistemological point of view: nonetheless, I assume that they bring the same behavioral suggestions and confidence to different agents.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lorenzo Magnani, Tommaso Bertolotti, Chris Mays, and Scott Jordan’s valuable comments on the earlier draft. I also need to thank Matías Ostas Vélez and Caroline Angleraux for constructive criticisms and further feedbacks. I also want to express my gratitude towards the two anonymous referees, for their crucial remarks and knowledgeable suggestions.
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Arfini, S. Situated ignorance: the distribution and extension of ignorance in cognitive niches. Synthese 198, 4079–4095 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02328-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02328-0