Self-knowledge and Self-ignorance Further Cognitive Implications of Epistemic and Other Bubbles

The Epistemic Bubble, taken as a cognitive concept, was first conceived by John Woods as a form of knowledge-immunization that inhibits the agent from clearly distinguishing what she knows from what she believes she knows. In recent years, the notion of the Epistemic Bubble has been referred to and rethought by different authors to discuss other concepts that emerge as conflictual in the third-person perspective and that are undistinguishable in the first-person perspective of the practical agent, i.e. ignorance, violence, and religious dogmas. All the reconfigurations of the original bubble maintain the same background assumption: the practical agent in first-person perspective is limited in obtaining self-knowledge regarding her cognitive possibilities. Intuitively, the bubbles also draw the extension of the agent’s self-ignorance, if we can label as such the intrinsic limits and blindspots of her self-knowledge. Are the bubbles equal in providing limitations and possibilities to the agent’s metacognitive capacities? Can the No Escape Thesis – which says that when we correct a detected error we place ourselves in a new epistemic bubble – be applied also to the other kinds of bubbles? In this paper we will address these questions, by advancing a review of the bubbles so far presented in the logical and epistemological literature and discussing their further cognitive implications.