Embodied, Extended, Ignorant Minds

New Studies on the Nature of Not-Knowing

The externalist currents in cognitive science have overturned different assumptions regarding how our cognition works: disembodiment, computationalism, and representationalism have been dethroned as untouchable premises and openly discussed from both ontological and epistemological perspectives. To be sure, different good old-fashioned concepts such as knowledge, information, and belief have been adapted to resonate in embodied, extended, and distributed perspectives on cognition. Ignorance, conversely, still needs to be adequately addressed in this new light. This volume aims at rethinking the analysis of ignorance, viewing it through the lens of an externalist take on cognition. To do so, authors working from different disciplines and perspectives discuss the features, definitions, and instances of ignorance, considering its role in the agents’ embodied, extended, and distributed cognitive states and processes. Given this approach’s novelty and complexity, this introductory chapter provides a preliminary discussion regarding the current research in Ignorance Studies and how the investigation of ignorance can open further lines of research in different externalist approaches. This chapter also briefly introduces the other contributors’ work and establishes an encompassing perspective on the volume’s content.