ilhan inan

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.

Given the current “definition” of the term 'meter' a simple argument appears to show that some scientists could come to know the speed of light a priori. I argue that coming to know that a proposition is true does not always put one in epistemic contact with the fact that makes that proposition true. The former may be trivial and a priori, though the latter may be substantial and a posteriori.

In this paper I respond to and elaborate on some of the ideas put forth on
my book The Philosophy of Curiosity (2012) as well as its follow-up “Curiosity and Ignorance” (2016) by Nenad Miščević, Erhan Demircioğlu,
Mirela Fuš, Safiye Yiğit, Danilo Šuster, Irem Günhan Altıparmak, and
Aran Arslan.

Though ignorance is rarely a bliss, awareness of ignorance almost always
is. Had we not been able to develop this powerful skill, there would
have been no philosophy or science, nor advanced forms of religion, art,
and technology. Awareness of ignorance, however, is not a motivator;
but when it arouses curiosity that is strong enough, it causes what may
be called an “epistemic” desire; a desire to know, to understand, to learn
or to gain new experiences, which is a basic motivator for inquiry. This
makes the relationship between curiosity and awareness of ignorance all
the more important. One can however find very little on this relationship
within the philosophical literature. In this essay this is what I wish to
explore. After a brief discussion of the question of whether awareness
of ignorance is a precondition for curiosity, based on my earlier work
(The Philosophy of Curiosity, Routledge, 2012) I attempt to show that
corresponding to the two forms of curiosity that I call “objectual” and
“propositional”, there are also two forms of ignorance. This will refute
the prejudice that awareness of ignorance must always have propositional content and therefore must always be about truth. I further argue that awareness of ignorance that does have propositional content can be of two different varieties: truth-ignorance versus fact-ignorance. One may simply be ignorant of whether a proposition is true or false (truthignorance); one may, on the other hand, know that a proposition is true but still be ignorant of the fact that makes it true (fact-ignorance). I
then show that awareness of ignorance, whether it is objectual or propositional, can always be translated into what I shall call awareness of
inostensibility. An important moral to be drawn from this discussion
is that reaching truth, even when it is coupled with certainty, does not
always eliminate one’s ignorance and therefore cannot be the ultimate
goal of inquiry.

Felsefe Soruları Ne İşe Yarar?
Özet
Felsefe soruları bilimde ve güncel hayatta sorulan soruların çoğundan farklı bir özelliğe sahipmiş gibi görünüyor.  Bilimin birçok sorusu için doğru yanıtın ne olduğu üzerine çağın bilim insanları uzlaşabiliyor. Aynı şey birçok güncel soru için de geçerli.  Felsefede ise bir soru üzerine iki bin yılı aşkın bir süredir çağın en zeki ve akıllı filozofları birbirlerinden çok farklı hatta zaman zaman birbirinin zıttı yanıtlar verebiliyor ve felsefe dünyasında bir felsefe sorusunun doğru yanıtı üzerine bir uzlaşıma varılamıyor. Neden? Felsefe soruları o denli zor ki doğru yanıta henüz ulaşacak olgunluğa ulaşamadık mı? Ya da birkaç dahi filozof aslında doğru yanıtı buldular da diğerlerinin bu yanıtı kabul etmemesinin nedeni aynı düzeyde dahi olmamaları mı?  Yoksa felsefe sorularının doğru yanıtlarına ulaşmak bizim gibi sınırlı varlıklar için tümden olanaksız mı? Ya da felsefe sorularının dünya görüşlerine göre değişen ve mutlak olmayan yanıtları mı var? Yoksa Wittgenstein’ın savunduğu gibi temel felsefe soruları aslında dil hatalarından kaynaklanan anlamsız sorular mı? Bu ve benzeri seçeneklerin hangisinde karar kılacağımız felsefenin doğasının ne olduğu hatta böyle bir doğanın olup olmadığı, felsefenin ne işe yaradığı, ilerleyip ilerlemediği, ilerliyorsa bunun ölçütlerinin ne olduğu türünde meta-felsefi görüşlerimizi derinden belirler.

What Are Philosophical Questions Good For?
Abstract

Philosophical questions appear to have a feature that most of the questions asked in science or in daily life lack.  For most scientific questions the leading scienctists of the day can reach a consenus on what the correct answer is, and the same is true of most of our everyday questions. In philosophy however the most intelligent and clever minds usually give radically different answers to the same question, which at times are contradictory, and consequently they cannot reach an agreement on what the correct answer is. Why? Are philosophical questions so difficult that we have not reached the maturity to find the right answers? Or have some genius philosophers have in fact found the right answers, but others do not accept them because they are not as intelligent? Or is it the case that reaching the correct answer to a philosophical question is impossible for limited beings like us? Or are the answers to philosophical questions not absolute answers but relative to our world views? Or are philosophical questions in fact nonsense, as Wittgenstein holds, beacuse they stem from our misuse of language? Which of these or other options we settle on deeply determines our meta-philosphical views concerning what the nature of philosophy is, or if there is one, what philosophy is good for, whether it achieves any progress, and if so, what the criteria are to deterimine that it does.

The question of how curiosity and knowledge are related brings about a host of interesting philosophical issues, the most important of which relates to what curiosity is. After all the classical “definition” equates curiosity with a desire to know. There is then the important comparative logical question: If knowledge is a propositional attitude, is curiosity so too? There are also issues concerning how curiosity relates not to knowledge, but rather its opposite, namely ignorance. What are the mental mechanisms we employ which allow us to become aware of our ignorance on a particular issue, and how does this motivate curiosity? Is awareness of ignorance a precondition for
curiosity? I have dealt with these and other related issues in detail in recent work. (Inan, I. The Philosophy of Curiosity. New York, London: Routledge, 2012.) Based on some of the ideas developed there, I now wish to elaborate on topics which should be relevant not just to virtue epistemology, but to epistemology in general, and especially to formal epistemology. These involve how curiosity relates to some of our basic epistemic attitudes that come short of knowledge. Among them two stand out as being the most relevant, that is belief and acquaintance. How does curiosity relate to the holding of a belief that is uncertain and how does it relate to having partial acquaintance with an
object?

I argue that Millianism has the very odd consequence that there are simple direct questions that Millians can grasp, but they cannot answer them in the positive or the negative, or in some other way, nor could they say that they do not know the answer.

I argue that Millianism has the very odd consequence that there are simple direct questions that Millians can grasp, but they cannot answer them in the positive or the negative, or in some other way, nor could they say that they do not know the answer.