Abstract:The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.
“…Brogaard's objection may also cause problems for more recent understandings of ignorance, like Piedrahita's (2021) access view or Siscoe and Silva's (2024) awareness account, but because the Standard View and the New View are the most popular accounts of ignorance, those are the views which I will focus on here. For more on how the gradability objection affects Pritchard (2021aPritchard ( , 2021b) and Meylan's (2020Meylan's ( , 2024 views that ignorance is a failure of inquiry though, see Section 1.…”
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.
“…Brogaard's objection may also cause problems for more recent understandings of ignorance, like Piedrahita's (2021) access view or Siscoe and Silva's (2024) awareness account, but because the Standard View and the New View are the most popular accounts of ignorance, those are the views which I will focus on here. For more on how the gradability objection affects Pritchard (2021aPritchard ( , 2021b) and Meylan's (2020Meylan's ( , 2024 views that ignorance is a failure of inquiry though, see Section 1.…”
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.
“…Motivating (Underdetermination) Scepticism (Meylan, 2022;Pritchard, 2021Pritchard, , 2022. Underdetermination scepticism raises a normative sceptical problem concerning what makes our beliefs about the world epistemically meritorious.…”
Section: Underdetermination As Ignorancementioning
The aim of this paper is to analyse and develop how scepticism becomes an intelligible question starting from requirements that epistemologists themselves aim to endorse. We argue for and defend the idea that the root of scepticism is the underdetermination principle by articulating its specificity as a respectable epistemic principle and by defending it against objections in current literature. This engagement offers a novel understanding of underdetermination-based scepticism. While most anti-sceptical approaches challenge scepticism by understanding it as postulating uneliminated scenarios of mass deception, or as endorsing unnatural epistemic requirements, we argue here that both contentions are mistaken. Underdetermination-based scepticism targets our beliefs by issuing a genuine question about the rational support they enjoy. If we cannot establish that the sources of our beliefs provide them the required epistemic merit and authority, they lack non-arbitrary grounds. This has a sizable impact on what constitutes a satisfactory anti-sceptical strategy. Strategies that merely focus on the scenario-based aspect of scepticism, or on the truth-functional evaluation of our beliefs, are shown to miss the mark of the sceptical threat. The proposed analysis ultimately provides a shift in perspective concerning the character and reach of philosophical doubt.
“…A quick note before we begin. Duncan Pritchard (2021aPritchard ( , 2021b and Anne Meylan (2020Meylan ( , 2022) reject the idea that the I-Schema is all there is to factual ignorance. Rather, they argue that ignorance also has a normative dimension, meaning that factual ignorance involves satisfying the following schema:…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A quick note before we begin. Duncan Pritchard (2021a, 2021b) and Anne Meylan (2020, 2022) reject the idea that the I‐Schema is all there is to factual ignorance. Rather, they argue that ignorance also has a normative dimension, meaning that factual ignorance involves satisfying the following schema: Normative I‐Schema : Necessarily, S is ignorant of the fact that p iff p and(Psychological Base Condition) S fails to Φ that p , and(Normative Condition) S fails to satisfy some salient normative standard by failing to Φ that p .…”
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.
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