Enacting Chance: Ignorance, Insight and Intuition

‘Enacting Chance’ is a Lorentz week long workshop, devoted to exploring the implications and connections between philosophical, psychological, and cognitive aspects of discovering, exploiting, and generating chance. Key topics for discussion will be ignorance-based reasoning, creativity, insight problem-solving, serendipity, intuition, and the enactive perspective on cognition. In addition to the intensive week of the workshop, events will commence during the summer and interactive materials will be made available for asynchronous participation. While we are assuming that the event will likely be fully online, we are taking opportunities for blended participation and enacting chance wherever possible in the programme. Some of the questions we would like to explore include:

•             Can we train for chance encounters/ events/ discoveries?

•             Is chance an emergent property of particular, and sometimes intersubjective, circumstances? 

•             What does make an agent shift from a situation of ignorance to one of discovery or insight?

•             When and from what does a deserving hypothesis emerge?

•             What epistemic and cognitive conditions can foster intuition?

•             Can chance encounters/ events/ discoveries foster cases of epistemic illusions?

•             What is the role of chance encounters/ events/ discoveries in insightful restructuring?