Selene Arfini

Online communities as virtual cognitive niches

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 displaying a social bias, can both foster civic awareness and promote problematic group-led behaviors in the virtually aggregated crowds. To support this affirmation, we will take into account the use of online communication networks during crises and we will argue that it can lead to ethically dubious consequences.

Of Habit and Abduction: Preserving Ignorance or Attaining Knowledge?

“Habit” is not an easy term in Peirce’s epistemology: on the one hand it often signifies the rule of action that is attained with the fixation of belief (1877) [EP 1: 109–123]; on the another hand, it is also described as an almost instinctual process that determines further reasonings, the element “by virtue of which an idea gives rise to another” (1873) [CP 7.354]. Stressing the apparently wide separation between these two traits of habit in the epistemic continuum between doubt and belief, we will be able to illustrate (a) a knowledge-based kind of habit, for the analysis of which we will also exploit Gibson’s concept of “affordance” (1950), which also plays a pivotal role in the justification of the agent’s own beliefs; and (b) an ignorance-based kind of habit, which will be proved as necessary for the beginning of thought, and which is at the base of the ampliative reasoning, condensed in another Peircean key topic (often qualified as “instinctual” in his writings): abduction.

Cognitive autoimmunity: Knowledge, ignorance and self-deception

In logic and epistemology, 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. The idea originated within the project initiated by Dov Gabbay and John Woods of a Naturalization of Logic, which aims at informing elaborated notions of logic and epistemology with well-established results of cognitive science. The term autoimmunity follows from the consideration that the cognitive states of belief, doubt, knowledge and ignorance affect the epistemic status of the agent who experiences them in ways she cannot anticipate nor control. Thus, we contend that the concept of autoimmunity could be usefully employed beyond the epistemological and logical fieldwork, in order to describe the cognitive mechanism supporting what the philosophical literature calls ‘epistemic feelings’, explaining some problematic occurrences of them related to the incorrect analysis of the agent’s own cognition (tip-of-the-tongue experience, misplaced feeling of knowing, etc).