Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The human part of chance-discovery is usually analyzed as an effect of the agent’s knowledge of herself and of her environment. In this paper, setting off from the importance of “understanding the meaning of an impending phenomenon as a chance,” we will analyze how chance-discovery activities are affected and driven by the agent’s ignorance, and the relationship she entertains with the latter. More specifically, we will spell out two kinds of ignorance that are relevant for chancediscovery, also considering which abductive chance-discovery processes they can be related to.