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).