Despite the recent increase in interest in philosophy about ignorance, little attention has been paid to the question of what makes it possible for a being to become aware of their own ignorance. In this paper, I try to provide such an account by arguing that, for a being to become aware of their own ignorance, they must have the mental capacity to represent something as being unknown to them. For normal adult humans who have mastered a language, mental representation (...) of an unknown is enabled by forming linguistic expressions whose content is grasped, but whose referent is unknown. I provide a neo-Fregean, a neo-Russellian, and then a unified account of this. On that basis, I then argue further that the content of ignorance can always be captured by a question. I then distinguish between propositional ignorance and non-propositional ignorance and argue that propositional ignorance attributions can be of three types, that-ignorance, whether-ignorance, and fact-ignorance. I conclude by arguing that the acquisition of truths, even when it yields knowledge that is certain, does not always eliminate one’s ignorance and that there is a degree of ignorance in almost everything we claim to know. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I will analyse three fundamental ways of governing ignorance though abduction, which are essential from an eco-cognitive and eco-logical point of view, in which the central role in human cognition of natural and artefactual environment is taken into account. First of all, according to the so-called GW-schema, proposed by Gabbay and Woods, abduction presents an ignorance-preserving or (ignorance-mitigating) character: given the fact that the abduced hypotheses aim at becoming truths, the basic ignorance is neither solved nor left untouched. Second, I (...) will contend that abduction is not always ignorance preserving but also knowledge enhancing. Indeed, according to the eco-cognitive model of abduction, I myself have recently proposed, we can easily see that, occasionally, knowledge can be immediately increased (and ignorance ‘killed’) through abduction: in this perspective, abduction does not have to be rigidly conceptualized as an inference to the best explanation in the received sense, which is as an inference that, to grant truth, also takes advantage of an empirical evaluation phase or an inductive phase, as Peirce classified it. Finally, it is important to stress that abductive cognition is at the roots of two fundamental cognitive processes. On one side, abductive cognition constructs (and/or takes advantage of the exploitation of) embodiments, external representations, enactions, artefacts and props, which involve ignorant entities suitably transformed in cognitive representations and/or devices. On the other side, abductive cognition dominates those ‘special’ cognitive creative processes that lead to what I call the disseminated ‘computational domestication of ignorant entities’: I will illustrate the example of the recent unconventional computational domestication of ignorant entities, which creates novel cognitive embodiments (morphological computation). (shrink)