Abstract
Ignorance: a word is still sufficient to describe one of the most troublesome problems of contemporary epistemology—without even mentioning its growing popularity outside the academic environment. The recent developments of the schools of thought called “epistemologies of ignorance” and “agnotology” have insisted on the necessity of a contextualization of ignorance, specifically, on the need to investigate the epistemological backgrounds that generate it and the analysis of information-sharing mechanisms that contribute to spread it in particular environments. In the words of Proctor and Schiebinger (2008, [p. i]) their goal is “to come to grips with how ignorance has been understood, created, and ignored, linking these ideas also to allied creations of secrecy, uncertainty, confusion, silence, absence, and impotence—especially as these pertain to scientific activities”.
We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926
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Notes
- 1.
Ignorance, in many forms, is a recurring hot topic in today’s news. Indeed, whenever words such as “fake news,” “misinformation,” “uneducated opinions” are mentioned by politicians, journalists, and lawmakers, the multifaceted concept of ignorance is taken into account and put under the spotlight. Moreover, uninformed or uneducated citizens are the unwilling center of many social and political phenomena that had concerned the so-called “occidental liberal democracies” in the last decades (amongst the others: the rise of populist parties, the spread of conspiracy theories, the diffusion of anti-scientific theories movements, etc.; cf. (Inglehart and Norris 2016; Lupia 2016)). In fact, it goes without saying that the more knowledgeable the citizens are, the better the democratic process will work, and the contrary, mutatis mutandis, is also true. So, the crisis that journalism faces worldwide (McChesney 2003; Blumler 2010) (caused, mostly but not only, by the rising importance of unconventional media, above all of social network sites), is double-tied to the changing relationship between powerful forces and voting crowds in the occidental democracies (Levy and Nielsen 2010). Notwithstanding the importance of this subject, to avoid straying from the path of a theoretical investigation, in this book I will not directly deal with the increasing relevance of the topic of “ignorance” outside the academic environments. I will, though, examine some aspects of the phenomenon of “fake news” in the last two chapters of the book, in which I discuss the impact that ignorance has on the social cognition of the agent, especially in particular information-based contexts.
- 2.
The so-called “Epistemologies of Ignorance” and “Agnotology” are schools of thoughts initiated in the last few decades by authors in different disciplines (mainly sociology, social philosophy, psychology, and anthropology) who aimed at investigating the impact of ignorance in current and past societies (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Sullivan and Tuana 2007; Davies and McGoey 2012; Townley 2011).
- 3.
The only academic works that examine ignorance without an explicit reference to its moral implications are the epistemological ones that aim at finding the definition for it between an array of possibilities—in particular (Peels 2010, 2011, 2017; Le Morvan 2010, 2011). Nonetheless, even if the authors of these accounts do not explicitly consider the moral implications of ignorance in their main argument, the examples that they take into consideration are almost always morally loaded—e.g. (Peels 2011, pp. 350–351; Le Morvan 2010, p. 36).
- 4.
- 5.
In this work the term “fugitive” or “fugitivity” when connected to the concept of ignorance refers to the apparent inability of the cognitive agent to grasp the existence or depth of her own ignorance. The fugitive nature of ignorance is mainly connected to the “Ignorance’s Concealment-Detection Problem,” which I illustrate in the second chapter. In few words, it states: “A trouser-wearing theory of ignorance would indeed have something helpful to say, among other things, about how ignorance is both inapparent enough to escape personal detection and yet recognizable enough from an external point of view to permit subsequent correction, and about the factors implicated in this transition from personal concealment to external detection.”
- 6.
A barely comprehensive list of authors and currents which should be referred to when speaking of the transversal interest of philosophers for ignorance are, of course, Socrates and Plato (in particular The Republic—cf. (Adam 1963), Protagoras—cf. (Taylor 2009), Sophist—cf. (Bernadete 1986), Meno—cf. (Scott 2006), Apology—cf. (Burnet 1977)), classical and modern Skeptics, Nicola De Cusa and his treatise De Docta Ignorantia—cf. (Hopkins 1981), the Kantian noumenon or the “thing in itself”, and John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”.
- 7.
Significantly, one of the excerpts of Proctor’s book reports an internal memo of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company of 1969 that says “Doubt is our product.” In that volume, Proctor and Schiebinger (2008) denounces the generation of useful ignorance by powerful companies that tried to reach their goals by distributing unvalidated data and hiding relevant information, as an act of both social injustice and a reproachable epistemic behavior.
- 8.
Smithson (1988) mainly distinguishes ignorance in error and irrelevance, to further dividing them, error in distortion (as confusion and inaccuracy) and incompleteness (as uncertainty—vagueness, probability and ambiguity—and absence) and irrelevance in untopicality, taboo, and undecidability.
- 9.
Tuana (2006) distinguishes ignorance in Knowing that we do not, but not caring to know, We do not even know that we do not know, They do not want us to know, Willful ignorance, Ignorance produced by the construction of epistemically disadvantaged identities, and Loving Ignorance.
- 10.
Haas and Vogt (2015) distinguish four main forms of ignorance: Preferred Ignorance, Investigative Ignorance, Presumed Knowledge, and Complete Ignorance.
- 11.
In this context I prefer to avoid further commenting Peels/Le Morvan’s debate for the little importance that the distinction they discuss makes in the investigation of the cognitive traits of ignorance, or how ignorance represents a pregnant cognitive state for the human agent.
- 12.
Specifically, the central argumentation of Stoljar (2006) volume Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness regards how our ignorance concerning “non-conscious facts” increases scholars’ puzzlement about consciousness; Gross (2010) presents case studies of ecological design where the inclusion of surprise and the relative conscious acknowledgement of ignorance benefit the design and negotiation processes; at last, Firestein (2012) sees ignorance as the main fuel of scientific progress. The last book basically argues that scientists constantly aim at diminishing humanity’s ignorance but, at the same time, by answering some important questions, they uncover other problems and issues, which naturally emerge from the newly achieved knowledge and doubts regarding it.
- 13.
Throughout the book I use the gendered pronouns “she” and “her” when referring to the real agent and her features. With this choice I do not mean to refer just to the female population of human agents, but I use female pronouns as an alternative to the longer, even if more accurate, ones, namely “he or she” and “his or her.”
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Arfini, S. (2019). Do We Get to Know the Unknown?. In: Ignorant Cognition. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14362-6_1
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