The Irreducibility of Ignorance. A Reply to Rik Peels

Social Epistemology Reply and Review Collective, 2019

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".

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.

Erkenntnis

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

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.

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.

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

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.

Awareness of Ignorance, 2020

Despite the recent increase in interest in philosophy about ignorance, little attention has been paid to the question of what makes it possible for a being to become aware of their own ignorance. In this paper, I try to provide such an account by arguing that, for a being to become aware of their own ignorance, they must have the mental capacity to represent something as being unknown to them. For normal adult humans who have mastered a language, mental representation of an unknown is enabled by forming linguistic expressions whose content is grasped, but whose referent is unknown. I provide a neo-Fregean, a neo-Russellian, and then a unified account of this. On that basis, I then argue further that the content of ignorance can always be captured by a question. I then distinguish between propositional ignorance and non-proposi-tional ignorance and argue that propositional ignorance attributions can be of three types, that-ignorance, whether-ignorance, and fact-ignorance. I conclude by arguing that the acquisition of truths, even when it yields knowledge that is certain, does not always eliminate one's ignorance and that there is a degree of ignorance in almost everything we claim to know.

Springer International Publishing, 2019

This book offers a comprehensive philosophical investigation of ignorance. Using a set of cognitive tools and models, it discusses features that can describe a state of ignorance if linked to a particular type of cognition affecting the agent’s social behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity. The author defines ignorance as a cognitive condition that can be either passively (and unconsciously) borne by an agent or actively nurtured by him or her, and a condition that entails epistemic limitations (which can be any lack of knowledge, belief, information or data) that affect the agent’s behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity. The author subsequently describes the ephemeral nature of ignorance, its tenacity in the development of human inferential and cognitive performance, and the possibility of sharing ignorance among human agents within the social dimension. By combining previous frameworks such as the naturalization of logic, the eco-cognitive perspective in philosophy and concepts from Peircean epistemology, and adding original ideas derived from the author’s own research and reflections, the book develops a new cognitive framework to help understand the nature of ignorance and its influence on the human condition.