Abstract
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.
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- 1.
Although it is true that Woods introduced the term autoimmunity in logic, I should point out that the concept was already introduced in the philosophical arena by Jacques Derrida, in 1994. He deployed the term in order to describe the agent’s self-attack and self-deception in the “bio-political” field—which comprehends the relationship between the individual agent and the political asset within she is included. “To protect its life, to constitute itself [...], it must therefore take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself” (Derrida 1994, p. 177).
- 2.
Several famous examples of how easy these situations may occur can be found in Burton, “On Being Certain” Burton (2008).
- 3.
Nagel (2010) also presents a small collection of the empirical works over the effects that epistemic anxiety has on the decision making of the agent both in ordinary and controlled circumstances.
- 4.
For instance, Van Randenborgh and colleagues brought experimental results suggesting how in particular psychological states such as dysphoria, processes of rumination—“a phenomenon at the intersection of cognitive and affective processes”—may foster severe indecision and less confidence in one’s hardly-reached decisions, triggering states of deeper depression (Randenborgh et al. 2010, p. 230).
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Arfini, S. (2019). Cognitive Autoimmunity: Metacognitive Consequences of the Bubble Theses. In: Ignorant Cognition. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14362-6_4
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