Ignorance and Epistemic Value

To appear in: Grazer Philosophische Studien

It is commonly accepted-not only in the philosophical literature but also in daily life-that ignorance is a failure of some sort. As a result, a desideratum of any ontological account of ignorance is that it must be able to explain why there is something wrong with being ignorant of a true proposition. This paper shows two things. First, two influential accounts of ignorance-the Knowledge Account and the True Belief Account-do not satisfy this requirement. They fail to provide a satisfying normative account of the badness of ignorance. Second, I suggest an alternative explanation of what makes ignorance a bad cognitive state. In a nutshell, ignorance is bad because it is the manifestation of a vice, namely, of what Cassam calls "epistemic insouciance".

Acres of paper have been used in discussions of the knowability paradox. But it still hasn't gone away, although it has been argued that it should, cf. Jenkins [2009]. In this note I will consider the general form of the argument and what conditions it should meet to be philosophically relevant. The sense of philosophically relevant I am intending here is that that although we can't really dismiss or dissolve the argument, we find the conclusion unacceptable. I will then propose a version of the argument which I believe meets these conditions.

Synthese, 2020

Ignorance is a spooky word in philosophy. At first, it appears vague, almost too broad. On second thought, it suggests more concrete and familiar notions, such as false belief (Hogrefe et al. 1986), error (Woods 2013), absence of knowledge (Le Morvan 2010), lack of true beliefs (Peels 2011), doubt (Shepherd et al. 2007), and misinformation (Bessi et al. 2014). The list might go on for quite some time, since, notwithstanding its spookiness, ignorance is a concept that is acquiring a growing importance in the philosophical literature (Sullivan and Tuana 2007; Peels 2017; Arfini 2019). Indeed, recently, some authors have tried to come up with a specific description for it,Footnote1 or to list a well defined taxonomy of its instantiations,Footnote2 but, so far, no concluding verdict has been reached. For now, ignorance remains an umbrella term, which refers to different kinds of cognitive and epistemological phenomena. Given its comprehensive nature, ignorance still represents a rich concept in philosophy, logic and cognitive science, which gives reason to pursue a deeper and more focused analysis of it.

In this paper, we will present, on the one hand, those formulations that have motivated research on epistemic value, and the other, discuss the fact that the recent discussions about the value of knowledge has begun to explore the pos- sibility that there is not knowledge that has a special epistemic value, but another epistemic state, namely the understanding.

1979

Argues for the thesis of universal ignorance, i.e., for the claim that nobody can ever know anything. To this effect, puts forward versions of the classical Cartesian argument for skepticism as well as novel arguments involving normative premises and the concept of certainty. Universal ignorance gives rise to further skeptical results: in order

Social Epistemology, 2018

Recent years have seen a surge in publications in epistemology of ignorance. In this article I examine the proliferation of the concept ignorance that has come with the increased interest in the topic. I identify three conceptions of ignorance in the current literature: (1) Ignorance as lack of knowledge/true belief, (2) Ignorance as actively upheld false outlooks and (3) Ignorance as substantive epistemic practice. These different conceptions of ignorance are as of yet unacknowledged but are bound to impede epistemology of ignorance and therefore need to be uncovered. After discussing three unsuccessful ways of dealing with these varying conceptions, I put forward an integrated conception of ignorance that is more adequate for serving as the foundation of epistemology of ignorance. Introducing an alternative conception of ignorance provides us with a foundation for both epistemological and more broadly philosophical work on ignorance.

Ignorance is not always bad; far from it. Looking at the issue in its most general aspect there is the obvious point that for finite beings massive ignorance is a precondition of having an epistemically functional life, for cognitive overload is an epistemic liability. There is an indefinite, indeed infinite, number of things that we do not have the slightest need to know-the number of hairs on your head at midnight on your next Birthday, for instance. Furthermore, we actively need not to know most of them (or not to spend time and energy investigating them) in order to conserve cognitive capacity for those things that we do need to know. Less abstractly there is also the point that there are many things it would be morally and/or prudentially bad to know-intimate details that are none of our business; techniques of criminality; methods of rekindling old ethnic hatreds in a population. These points are familiar from debates about 'the value question' in relation to knowledge. 1 Furthermore, as Cynthia Townley has argued, many forms of epistemic cooperation, and many of the dispositions involved in epistemic virtues generally, depend crucially upon our leaving some useless or harmful things unknown, and passively or actively preserving others' ignorance of things they need not or should not know (Townley 2011). In short, good epistemic practice is necessarily highly selective in all sorts of ways.

American Philosophical Quarterly

It is argued that the two main accounts of ignorance in the contemporary literature-in the terms of the lack of knowledge and the lack of true belief-are lacking in key respects. A new way of thinking about ignorance is offered that can accommodate the motivations for both of the standard views, but which in the process also avoids the problems that afflict these proposals. In short, this new account of ignorance incorporates the idea that ignorance essentially involves not just the absence of a certain epistemic good, but also an intellectual failing of inquiry. It is further contended that making sense of this normative dimension to ignorance requires one to situate one's account of ignorance within a wider epistemic axiology.

Philosophical Studies, 2024

Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance can often be a degreed notion-how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, 'ignorant' picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe.

2010

This article offers an analysis of ignorance. After a couple of preliminary remarks, I endeavor to show that, contrary to what one might expect and to what nearly all philosophers assume, being ignorant is not equivalent to failing to know, at least not on one of the stronger senses of knowledge. Subsequently, I offer two definitions of ignorance and argue that one’s definition of ignorance crucially depends on one’s account of belief. Finally, I illustrate the relevance of my analysis by paying attention to four philosophical problems in which ignorance plays a crucial role.