The ignorance behind inconsistency toleration

Abstract

Inconsistency toleration is the phenomenon of working with inconsistent information without threatening one's rationality. Here I address the role that ignorance plays for the tolerance of contradictions in the empirical sciences. In particular, I contend that there are two types of ignorance that, when present, can make epistemic agents to be rationally inclined to tolerate a contradiction. The first is factual ignorance, understood as temporary undecidability of the truth values of the conflicting propositions. The second is what I call "ignorance of theoretical structure", which is lack of knowledge of relevant inference patterns within a specific theory. I argue that these two types of ignorance can be explanatory of the scientists' rational disposition to be tolerant towards contradictions, and I illustrate this with a case study from neutrino physics.

El realismo estructural cognitivo en filosofía de la ciencia: reconstrucción y presentación crítica

“…Bueno 1999 y la ignorancia (e.g. Martínez-Ordaz 2021), así como para refinar el estudio de problemas diacrónicos como el cambio teórico (e.g. Bueno, 1999) y el progreso científico (e.g.…”

Scientific understanding through big data: From ignorance to insights to understanding

“…- Second, ignorance of theoretical structure has been characterized as lacking knowledge of the (relevant) inference patterns that scientific theories allow for. When ignoring (the relevant parts of) the theoretical structure of a theory, scientists are not capable of grasping abstract causal connections between the propositions of their theory, they can neither identify the logical consequences of the propositions that they are working with nor can explain under which conditions the truth value of such propositions will be false (Martínez-Ordaz, 2021, p. 12) 6…”