This article presents silence as a cognitive tool to comprehend the environment. Two dimensions of silence are addressed: a natural mechanism and human beings' social and cultural construction. There is a link between these two dimensions because, on the one hand, agents' cognitive strategies based on silence influence how meanings and uses of silence have been constructed. The meanings of silence we use are contextual shapers of silence-based cognitive strategies. Silence is analyzed as a resource for coping with ambiguity: situations perceived as uncertain provoke doubt and confusion because they can be understood differently or suggest different interpretations. These situations can occur in the face of epistemic disruption. The consequence is a transfer of the ambiguity property of these situations to the usual ways of relating to the world and people. The cognitive approach is based here on a semiotic-hermeneutic interpretation of silence from a phenomenological perspective. This accounts for a paradox: even if silence does not exist (the world is acoustic), it is real. The silence experience is a non-inferential cognitive capacity located at the base of perception: a stimulus that suggests a particular gesture as an action different from the usual one to deal with the environment.

本文将沉默作为理解环境的认知工具。沉默的两个方面得到了解决：自然机制和人类的社会和文化建构。这两个维度之间存在联系，因为一方面，主体基于沉默的认知策略影响沉默的含义和用途的构建方式。我们使用的沉默的含义是基于沉默的认知策略的情境塑造者。沉默被分析为应对歧义的一种资源：被认为不确定的情况会引起怀疑和困惑，因为它们可以被不同地理解或提出不同的解释。这些情况可能会在认知中断时发生。结果是将这些情况的模糊性转移到与世界和人相关的通常方式。这里的认知方法基于从现象学角度对沉默进行符号学解释学解释。这就解释了一个悖论：即使沉默不存在（世界是有声的），它也是真实的。沉默体验是一种位于感知基础上的非推理认知能力：一种刺激，暗示特定的姿势是一种不同于通常处理环境的行为。