Latent epistemologies and inclusion: about the difficulty of analyzing implicit assumptions

Personal epistemology represents an area of philosophy that deals with the nature of human knowledge and that turns its attention to investigating the personal beliefs and conceptions that individuals have about it and the way of knowing. These individual beliefs guide the way of understanding the world, solving problems and implementing learning processes. Starting from the constructs of personal epistemology and of epistemological belief, in recent years an important area of research has arisen in the international scientific literature, which investigated how personal epistemological perspectives are correlated and how these have implications for teaching. According to scientific literature, teachers today should learn to give space, in addition to the presentation of knowledge, also to problems and considerations of epistemic nature, regarding the ways in which such knowledge is acquired. The interest is often limited only to the content of knowledge rather than the process of their acquisition. Promoting the development in our students of a sort of epistemic sensitivity, a mental habit that can then be activated even outside of school, represents an important condition for the development of various skills related to cognitive autonomy and the habit of critically evaluating the information received.