The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World

Addressing Amnesia, Performing Trauma, 2023

Social Epistemology Reply and Review Collective, 2019

2015

Ilya Somin effectively exposes the extent of public ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance may damage democratic outcomes. This underpins his case for a more streamlined state, leaving more to individual “foot voting”—where citizens are better incentivized to choose knowledgeably and rationally. One cannot dispute the fact of deep public ignorance. However, one can question the widespread assumption that ignorance is necessarily ethically significant, always productive of undesirable outcomes, or otherwise implicitly dangerous for democracy. The sheer lack of individual efficacy in mass democracies not only incentivizes ignorance, but also creates conditions wherein such ignorance is individually harmless, and unlikely in the aggregate to greatly contribute to one or another outcome. Beyond this, there may be no way to attain meaningful knowledge in the areas where democratic decision making is most fraught. Indeed, ignorance may at times lead to better outcomes than would knowledge. The seemingly unassailable status of democracy itself, and the valuable institutional stability that this status ensures, seem to be founded upon a bedrock of public ignorance as to the real nature of democracy.

Expertise: Philosophical Perspectives, 2024

One of the roles of public expertise is to spread useful knowledge throughout society. In this way, public expertise can combat ignorance. Crucially, however, it is also explained how a surprising central role of public expertise is often to manufacture the very ignorance that is being combatted. This is because there is more to ignorance than simply the absence of knowledge, as ignorance more specifically concerns lacking the knowledge that one should have. In this way, ignorance is never normatively neutral (in the manner that mere lack of knowledge can be). What expert-led public information does is thus create a reasonable expectation that one should know certain important truths, and hence ensures that those who remain unaware of them are now ignorant of them. Ignorance must thus often be manufactured by public experts before those same experts can combat it. This role of public expertise--informative public expertise--in responding to ignorance is contrasted with another important role of public expertise--critical public expertise--that often has an explicitly political bearing. The aim of critical public expertise is to show how members of the public ought to know truths of which they are unaware, and hence charge them with ignorance. Rather than manufacturing ignorance, as informative public expertise does, it thus instead reveals hidden ignorance. In this fashion it serves an explicitly critical social function. By appealing to the normative nature of ignorance we are thus able to capture two very different ways in which public expertise relates to, and ultimately combats, ignorance.

Most of us think that being unwittingly ignorant-as we are when we forget a friend's birthday or remain blind to glaring social injustices-is a bad thing. But if ignorance is really so bad, why aren't we required not to be ignorant? On the standard view that ignorance is the lack of knowledge, ignorance can be no more epistemically evaluable than absences. I develop a theory of ignorance that illuminates and resolves the major paradoxes that arise for the ethics and epistemology of ignorance. What kinds of epistemic shortcomings attach to ignorance? What obligations, if any, do we have not to be ignorant? This dissertation offers answers to those questions. Part I addresses the paradox of the evaluability of absences: absences are neither good nor bad, rational nor irrational. I first show that there exists an array of counterexamples to the common view that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, with sources in psychology, scientific theory, and everyday life where someone is ignorant because they fail to consider obvious and relevant possibilities. I then use these examples to argue for a substantive form of ignorance that is an attitude similar to belief. Many take it as evident that ignorant just is the state of not knowing. But I argue that this is incorrect: not knowing is neither necessary nor sufficient for some cases of ignorance. If epistemic evaluability is going to have any bearing, ignorance must be more than mere not knowing. Part II is the test case for ignorance's epistemic evaluability. I start by addressing a second paradox about ignorance and responsibility. If we follow the standard line that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, then ignorance isn't something that we can be responsible for. Some have confronted this paradox by suggesting that a theory of responsibility for ignorance (esp. ignorance of racial injustices) rests on our social obligations. On such a view, we are responsible for our ignorance just in case it harms others or further perpetuates social inequities. But such a theory suggests that we are only responsible because we have let down our communities since we owe it those around us not to be ignorant. I argue for a kind of substantive ignorance that takes an attitude form where agents are just as responsible for ignorance as they would be for belief. In the dissertation, I call this attitude ignoring to distinguish it from the common, passive form of ignorance. Ignoring, on my view, structures an inquiry so that we are responsible when we fail to consider obvious and relevant answers to an open inquiry. Importantly, the responsibility is agent-centered; it is not based on others, but on the idea that we owe it to ourselves to be as rational as possible. Part III applies my theory of ignorance to a problem in perception. Hallucinations, illusions, and attentional blindness are all forms of ignorance where perceivers 'miss out' on information in their

I argue that ignorance should be understood as the absence of propositional knowledge or the absence of true belief, the absence of objectual knowledge, or the absence of procedural knowledge. I also argue that epistemic vices, hermeneutical frameworks, intentional avoidance of evidence, and other important phenomena that the agential and structural conceptions of ignorance draw our attention to, are best understood as important accidental features of ignorance, not as properties that are essential to ignorance.

2011

Epistemology and ignorance are intimately related.<br> We might naively construe the relationship as hostile because<br> epistemology deals with operations of knowledge, the goal<br> being the elimination of ignorance. It appears that episte­-<br> mology and ignorance are radically opposed to each other.<br> But a deeper scrutiny will manifest some of the complexities <br> involving the two. Perhaps a juxtaposing of the two, as in<br> 'epistemology of ignorance', might offer an effective semantic<br> tool that will assist us in drawing out the nuances implied<br> and prove to be educative and transformative.<br> So this article studies the complex phenomenon of ignorance,<br> exploring its different forms, examining how it is produced<br> and sustained. It problematizes the role that they play in<br> knowledge production and circulation, and seeks to under­<br> stand how they impact the power...

Engaging the Other: Public policy and Western-Muslim intersections, 2014

Public policy can be informed by a better understanding of the historical and contemporary engagements between Western and Muslim civilizations. Despite the prevalence of clashes produced by ignorance, a nuanced understanding of public opinion and behaviors of people reveals another reality. There are numerous instances of the members of Western and Muslim societies moving from conflict to co-operation. Individuals and organizations have found common ground between the principles underlying Islam and post-Enlightenment Western societies, enhancing pluralism, social justice, human rights, the rule of law, and cross-cultural engagement.