In Defence of the Normative Account of Ignorance

Social Epistemology Reply and Review Collective, 2019

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

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.

Nous, 2024

Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of the view that factual ignorance is the absence of awareness, an account that both comes apart from the dominant views and overcomes their deficiencies. Given the important role that ignorance plays in moral and legal theory and our understanding of various epistemic injustices, a precise and theoretically unproblematic account of the nature of ignorance is important not only for normative epistemology, but also for law, ethics, and applied epistemology.

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.

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.

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.

Philosophia, 2011

In this paper, I respond to Pierre Le Morvan’s critique of my thesis that ignorance is lack of true belief rather than absence of knowledge. I argue that the distinction between dispositional and non-dispositional accounts of belief, as I made it in a previous paper, is correct as it stands. Also, I criticize the viability and the importance of Le Morvan’s distinction between propositional and factive ignorance. Finally, I provide two arguments in favor of the thesis that ignorance is lack of true belief rather than absence of knowledge.

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.

The recent literature in epistemology has seen an upsurge of interest in the topic of epistemic value. The aim of this paper is to relate some of the key themes in this literature to the specific topic of ignorance. In particular, we will be exploring an important ambiguity in the very notion of epistemic value, and also examining how best to understand a distinctively epistemic kind of value. While there is often a straightforward epistemic disvalue to ignorance, I will be delineating some interesting cases in which ignorance is valuable, and valuable moreover in a specifically epistemic manner.

Social Epistemology Reply and Review Collective, 2019

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.

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.

This paper investigates the relation (if any) between my ignoring a fact and my ignorance of it. Does my ignoring, say, that my remarks are hurting her feelings hold any tight, necessary, relation with my being ignorant of this fact? This question has some interesting repercussion for a recent discussion between El Kassar (2018) and Peels (2019) regarding how to accommodate two apparently incompatible conceptions of "ignorance"-the stative and the agential conception of ignorance-that are both present in the philosophical literature.

Synthese, 2020

I argue that the Standard View of ignorance is at odds with the claim that knowledge entails truth. In particular, if knowledge entails truth then we cannot explain away some apparent absurdities that arise from the Standard View of ignorance. I then discuss a modified version of the Standard View, which simply adds a truth requirement to the original Standard View. I show that the two main arguments for the original Standard View fail to support this modified view.