Abstract
Rik Peels has ingeniously argued that ignorance is not equivalent to the lack or absence of knowledge. In this response, I defend the “Standard View of Ignorance” according to which they are equivalent. In the course of doing so, some important lessons will emerge concerning the nature of ignorance and its relationship to knowledge.
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Notes
A reviewer of this journal questioned whether it’s good English to say ‘S is ignorant that p’ rather than ‘S is ignorant of the fact that p’. I take the former to count as good English. Here is why. According to the online Oxford English Dictionary’s definition 1c of ‘ignorant’, it can be used in sentences with a dependent clause. The OED gives the following example: “I am ignorant that till now I ever made you this offer.” The construction has also been used by numerous philosophers. Here are two representative examples: (1) Carl Ginet 1975, 16 writes: “it is conceivable that S should have been in doubt or ignorant that p”; (2) John Hyman 2006, 900 writes: “For a verb-phrase of the form ‘is ignorant that p’ consists of a psychological verb followed by a ‘that’ clause.” I thus think that a strong case can be made for regarding ‘S is ignorant that p’ as good English.
According to Goldman and Olsson 2009, 20, (COMPL) applies only where p is true. As I will later argue, however, it’s important to distinguish between factive and propositional ignorance (and knowledge), a distinction Goldman and Olsson fail to draw. In light of this distinction, it is more accurate to say that, in the case of factive ignorance and knowledge, (COMPL) applies only where p is true; in the case of propositional ignorance and knowledge, (COMPL) applies whether or not p is true.
Regarding his usage of ‘suspension of judgment’ Peels adds the qualifier “whether one has ever considered p or not.” (58) I think adding this qualifier is not well-conceived for reasons I shall give shortly.
For instance, prior to drawing his putative distinction between what he calls “dispositional” and “non-dispositional” accounts of belief, and in the context of discussing belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment, Peels writes that “[e]ach of these doxastic attitudes may be occurrent or dispositional. If some cognitive subject S at some time t occurrently believes that p, then at t S is considering p or thinking about p or reflecting on p, and believing p. If at t S latently believes p, then at t S is not considering p or thinking about p or reflecting on p, but still believes p.” (58)
A reviewer of this journal has pointed out that Peels’s use of ‘ought’ seems to be merely conceptual rather than normative.
In fairness to Peels, Cohen 1995 does seem to hold something akin to (i). For instance, Cohen writes: “though many beliefs only commence at the time of their first being felt, there are many others that apparently antedate this, just as by being dried in the sun a lump of clay may become brittle long before pressure is applied and it breaks. Thus, if you have believed that Oxford is larger than St Andrews, then you probably (…) have long believed that London is larger than St Andrews, even if your belief has never explicitly occurred to you until you were asked. Indeed, even if you have never consciously believed anything implying that London is larger than St Andrews, your answer to the question ‘Do you believe that London is larger than St Andrews?’ would most probably be ‘Yes’. That is to say, a present feeling that London is larger than St Andrews would be taken to display a pre-existing disposition to feel this.” (5) Even if Cohen does hold something akin to (i), I can find no textual evidence that he also subscribes to the much stronger and more implausible claim (ii), and Peels has not provided any such evidence. Given the implausibility of (ii), Peels may have unintentionally made Cohen’s position seem more untenable than it is.
As Goldman 1986, 202, pointed out: “If a person has never thought whether New York is in Venezuela, then he does not believe that New York is in Venezuela. If he has never asked himself whether zebras wear codpieces in the wild, then he does not already believe that zebras don’t wear codpieces in the wild. He may be disposed to assent to these propositions unhesitatingly, the moment they are queried. But this just shows he has beliefs from which these conclusions would readily be inferred. It does not show that he already believes each conclusion, prior to the question being raised.”
A reviewer of this journal suggested that perhaps what Peels should have said is that it follows from Cohen's view that for each proposition one is able to grasp, one has some doxastic attitude or other toward that proposition. I’m inclined to agree with the reviewer that this is perhaps what Peels should have said follows from Cohen’s view; it makes for a more defensible view than the one Peels actually attributed to Cohen. Nonetheless, instead of multiplying actual doxastic attitudes in this way, we can hold instead that for each proposition one is able to grasp, one has a potential doxastic attitude toward that proposition. This alternative has the advantage of not multiplying actual doxastic attitudes without necessity.
Cf. Dennett 1988, 45.
While a belief that p held dispositionally is potentially occurrent, this should not be confused with supposing that a potential belief that p (a belief that one would have upon consideration of p) is an actual belief that p which one holds dispositionally.
Peels quite reasonably allows that these categories of ignorance can be split into subcategories. For instance, he points out that (a), “as it stands, does not tell us anything about S’s attitude toward p, that is, it does not tell us whether S believes p, disbelieves p, suspends judgment on p, or has never even considered p.” While Peels is generally right, note that to disbelieve p where p is false is, given how he uses ‘disbelieve’, equivalent to believing (correctly) that p is false. Peels also points out that there are different ways in which (e) could be instantiated, “for instance, by believing that p without having any good reasons for p, or by S’s true belief’s being incoherent with the rest of her doxastic evidence base.” (60) In any case, he thinks that the list seems to be exhaustive “in the sense that there is no way in which a cognitive subject might fail to know some proposition that is not an instance of one of these categories.” (60) I shan’t quarrel with him here.
This conflation is unfortunately abetted by a widespread failure amongst epistemologists to distinguish between factive and propositional knowledge. In fact, epistemologists often use ‘propositional knowledge’ and ‘factive knowledge’ interchangeably.
Even if p were true, propositional non-ignorance does not entail factive non-ignorance. For instance, suppose Sam believed p solely on the basis of a deep seated anti-Canadian prejudice and on no other ground at all. Unless one supposed (quite implausibly I think) that mere true belief suffices for factive knowledge, it seems much more plausible to hold that Sam is factively ignorant that p even if he is not propositionally ignorant that p.
Adherents (if any) of what Peels calls a “dispositional” account of belief may disagree, but I think for the reasons given earlier that this view is untenable. In any case, my defense of the Standard View of Ignorance is certainly not predicated on accepting that putative account of belief, and adherents of the Standard View of Ignorance need not hold it. In fact, Peels’s argumentation can provide them with a reason why they ought not hold such an account of belief.
A reviewer of this journal has asked if I really want to say that most people are ignorant of the fact that Hillary Clinton is not identical to her autobiography, just because they have never considered this proposition, for saying this seems blatantly false to the reviewer. I understand the reviewer’s intuition that this seems blatantly false; in fact, I too had it before reconsidering the matter. The intuition can be explained (or explained away if you will) as follows. It does seem quite obvious, as soon as we consider the proposition, that Hillary Clinton is not identical to her autobiography. Hence we are liable to conclude that we actually knew it all along, and so were never ignorant of this fact. This though may very well be akin to what psychologists call “hind-sight bias” or the “I knew it all along phenomenon” by which we tend to overestimate with hind-sight how much we actually knew. See Myers 1994, 15–19. Instead of regarding people as actually knowing that Hillary Clinton is not identical to her autobiography, I think it more prudent to claim that people potentially know that she is not identical to her autobiography, a potentiality that readily converts to an actuality upon consideration of the proposition in question.
The argument is strictly speaking invalid, for a conclusion about what is the case does not follow from premises concerning what “we would say.”
References
Cohen, L. J. (1995). An essay on belief and acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dennett, D. (1988). Brainstorms. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ginet, C. (1975). Knowledge, perception, and memory. Boston: D. Reidel.
Goldman, A., & Olsson, E. J. (2009). Reliabilism and the value of knowledge. In D. Pritchard, A. Millar, & A. Haddock (Eds.), Epistemic value (pp. 19–41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hyman, J. (2006). Knowledge and evidence. Mind, 115, 891–916.
Myers, D. (1994). Exploring social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Peels, R. (2010). What is ignorance? Philosophia, 38, 57–67.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to an anonymous referee of this journal and to Karen Le Morvan for very helpful comments and suggestions.