Embodied, Extended, Ignorant Minds: New Studies on the Nature of Not-Knowing

This book offers a new and externalist perspective in ignorance studies. Agnotology, the epistemology of ignorance, and, more generally, ignorance studies have grown to cover and explore different phenomena and subjects of research, from known events in history and sociology of science to the investigation of ordinary reasoning and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, although interested scholars have discussed ignorance phenomena and their impact on cognition, most of them have only adopted an internalist perspective to approach this theme. Meanwhile, even though externalist perspectives on cognition flourished in recent literature, authors have paid little attention to the emerging field of ignorance studies. Ignorance has been generally left out from the inquiries on the extension of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and predictive reasoning. Thus, in this volume, we seek to merge the two growing areas of research and to fill this research gap fruitfully. By addressing the uncomfortable themes that pertain to ignorance and related phenomena through an externalist perspective, this book aims to provide much food for thoughts to cognitive scientists and philosophers alike, enriching the current range and reach of both ignorance studies and externalist approaches to cognition.

​Selene Arfini is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, currently working on a project entitled “Ignorance in the perspective of the ecology of cognition: cognitive niches, the extended mind, and ignorance-based reasoning”. Her current work involves the foundation of a cognitively oriented epistemology of ignorance, with reference to the extended mind theory, cognitive niches construction studies, and a naturalized perspective on logic. She has established herself as an authority on the topic of ignorance in relation to cognition, recently publishing Ignorant Cognition – A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing, Springer (2019) and editing a Synthese Topical Collection on “Knowing the Unknown: Philosophical Perspective on Ignorance” (2020).