Abstract
This chapter offers a revision of the concept of ignorance discussed in recent models of abduction. Both ignorance preservation (GW-schema) and the tentative explanationism (AKM-schema) will be reanalyzed from an ecological and distributed perspective on cognition, instead coherent with the so-called EC-Model of abduction. We are convinced that a successful revision of the notion of ignorance in both AKM-schema and GW-schema of abduction can be exactly realized thanks to the EC-model. These theories present ignorance as an absence that occurs when the agents cannot reach useful explanations of a phenomenon in their epistemic environment. This absence surprises them, and this emotion triggers agents’ abductive reasoning, which, in turn, mitigates their ignorance. Abduction offers the agents a guessed “provisional” hypothesis capable to solve the ignorance-problem. However, both the state of being ignorant of something and the mitigation of not-knowing are complex processes. If we describe the agents as parts of cognitive systems, we can see them as engaged with the so-called affordances, which always provide qualitative and procedural information capable to help and trigger abductive inferential processes. We will argue that when a possible relation with the fact, which is investigated is unknown, and so affordances are absent – and consequently “unknown” – the lack of available knowledge is absolute. When this happens, the agent is compelled to abduce from an unknown affordance: In this case, it is the agents’ self-awareness of their ignorance that plays a role of a helpful tool. The reached full self-awareness of the complete ignorance at stake triggers unusual chances that favor exceptional abductive inferential processes capable to manage the cognitive situation. At the same time, the agent may experience these cases characterized by unknown affordances with a high degree of anguish. Indeed, the hypothesis will be more strongly supported by the motivation and will of the agent than by the cognitive role played by commonly accepted data and will be formed by unusual intuitions and data considered strange or exceptional. We will illustrate that in these cases, the management of anxiety – and control of it – is committed to general principles of research integrity related to the role of cognizant’s responsibility for his own actions.
It was a green stone head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. Its dominion was sickness and disease. The head was pierced. The amulet’s owner had worn it as a shield.
W. P. Blatty, 1971
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Notes
- 1.
Kierkegaard’s already stressed the role of anguish as “dizziness of freedom.” According to him, anguish opens the possibility of freedom, understood as a possibility, an expression that refers to the experience of absolute freedom of choice. Kierkegaard proposes the example of looking into an abyss: in this, a person will feel fear the possibility of falling and throwing himself off the cliff. Taking personal responsibility for our actions (to jump or not into the abyss) leads to self-consciousness (Kierkegaard, 1980: 61).
- 2.
Cf. infra., Sect. 9.3.2. for the meaning of this concept. For the moment, the reader can roughly understand it as a worldview.
- 3.
The classical schematic representation of abduction is expressed by what Gabbay and Woods (2005) call AKM-schema, which is contrasted to their own (GW-schema), which we are explaining in this section. For A they refer to Aliseda (1997, 2006), for K to Kowalski (1979), Kakas et al. (1993), Kuipers (1999), for M to Magnani (2001), and Meheus et al. (2002). A detailed abductive structure illustration of the AKM schema is given in an article written by Magnani (2009, Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1.3).
- 4.
Woods recently acknowledged the importance of the knowledge-enhancing character of abduction in Woods (2021).
- 5.
Particularization refers here to the mechanisms that govern the application in science of the meanings and values generally shared in a society (contextual meanings and values) (c.f., Longino, 1983).
- 6.
We use the term “cosmovision” to refer to the unified image of the world that arises from the biological and sociocultural interpretation of the environment. While a “worldview” is based on perception, a “cosmovision” arises from living together in a society with other people, so it encompasses both its biological and sociocultural aspects (Magnani et al., 2021).
- 7.
Here Feyerabend is quoting Rozental (1967: 117).
- 8.
Some of these external constraints were considered by Peirce as quickly performed by “instinctive” strategies, which would occur before conceptualization, when hypotheses are instantly reached by humans.
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Research for this article was supported by the PRIN 2017 Research 20173YP4N3-MIUR, Ministry of University and Research, Rome, Italy.
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Sans Pinillos, A., Magnani, L. (2022). How Do We Think about the Unknown? The Self-Awareness of Ignorance as a Tool for Managing the Anguish of Not Knowing. In: Arfini, S., Magnani, L. (eds) Embodied, Extended, Ignorant Minds. Synthese Library, vol 463. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01922-7_9
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