Abstract
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.
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Notes
For a highly influential account of the distinction between propositional and practical knowledge, see Ryle 1945, 4-16, and 1969, 27-32, 40-41. One of the first to make a distinction between propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance is Bertrand Russell in Russell 1910-1911, and 1980, 23, 25-32.
One might want to suggest that, next to propositional, practical, and experiential ignorance, there is ignorance of the right answer to a question. As it seems to me, however, this kind of ignorance is reducible to propositional ignorance. Imagine that Sam has put a piece of paper in a box and asks me what is in the box. If I am ignorant of the right answer to his question, I am ignorant of the (truth of the) proposition that there is piece of paper in the box, although I might simultaneously be ignorant of the proposition that there is not a hammer in the box, that there is not a shirt in it, etc., and know that there is not an elephant in the box (the box being far too small for that), etc. Thus, ignorance of the right answer to a question seems to consist of ignorance of two or more propositions, whether one disbelieves them, suspends judgment on them, or has never considered them. This is not to say, however, that it might not be useful in certain contexts, such as philosophy of science, to phrase ignorance in terms of one’s doxastic attitude toward the right answer to certain questions (see, for instance, Bromberger 1992, 115, 128 who defines a scientific theory’s acceptability partly in terms of ignorance of the right answer to specific questions).
Cohen 1995, 4.
Non-dispositional accounts tend to be fairly complex. According to Robert Audi, for instance, perceptual experience can sometimes leave some sort of doxastic trace that can count as a latent belief, even if one has not explicitly considered the proposition in question. Yet, he clearly distinguishes latent beliefs from dispositions to believe (see Audi 1994, 420ff.). I believe that the above, rough definition will do for present purposes.
Remember that many dispositional accounts of belief will reject option (d) as a genuine possibility of failing to know, given the fact that for any proposition p, one either believes, disbelieves, or suspends judgment on p. On such accounts, only (a), (b), (c), and (e) will count as instances of failing to know.
Where I take ‘warrant’ to be that (enough of) which turns true belief into knowledge.
In an interesting article, Talisse contends that we use the term ‘ignorance’ to denote (1) someone’s believing what is false, (2) someone’s having an unjustified belief, or (3) someone’s holding a belief at which she arrived in an epistemically irresponsible way (cf. Talisse 2006, 456). It is not clear, or at least not to me, what the difference between the second and third types of ignorance is supposed to be, but both of them seem to consist of cases in which a person has a belief that, even if true, does not amount to knowledge. This seems implausible: if the proposition p which the person in question believes is true, then we would not say that she is ignorant of p, although she might be ignorant of many other things, such as the existence of good evidence in favor of p.
For a defense of the intriguing idea that ‘knowledge’ is polysemous and that there is a sense of ‘knowledge’ in which it is identical to true belief, see Van Woudenberg 2005 and Van Woudenberg, “Which Value for What Knowledge?”, unpublished manuscript. I take this second route to include those contextualist accounts of ‘knowledge’ that have it that in some, but not all contexts a person S who has a mere true belief that p can properly be described as ‘knowing that p’.
For a statement of the idea that on a weak sense of ‘knowledge’ – where ‘knowing that p’ is synonymous with ‘being cognizant of p’, ‘being aware of p’, and ‘possesses the information that p’ – ‘lack of knowledge’ is identical to ‘ignorance’ whereas it is not on a stronger sense of ‘knowledge’, see Goldman and Olsson, “Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge,” (forthcoming).
On dispositional accounts of belief the subjunctive conditionals (3) and (4) will be understood as instances of (1) and (2).
Here I assume that one can only believe or disbelieve a proposition if one can grasp it.
Cohen 1995, 8, has argued that in abnormal circumstances – when one’s life seems to depend on concentrating on some other issue or when one is accidentally distracted by, say, a nearby thunderbolt - one might fail to form A toward p, even though one can be said to have A toward p.
See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics III.1,5, V.8.
See Smith 1983, 544–45.
See Smith 1983, 548ff.
This is argued by Van Woudenberg 2009.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Martijn Blaauw, Anthony Booth, Alvin Goldman, Thomas Müller, Herman Philipse, Jeroen de Ridder, Vincent van Oostrom, René van Woudenberg, and an anonymous referee of this journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.