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.

According to the Ignorance Factivity Thesis, for every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. By contrast, according to the Ignorance Non-Factivity Thesis, it is false that, for every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. I argue that, on balance, the case for the latter thesis is stronger than the case for the former.

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)

There is a debate on the nature of ignorance in contemporary epistemology. The standard view holds that ignorance is the lack of knowledge, while the new view contends that ignorance is the lack of true belief. Rather than taking a side in this dispute, Pritchard recently offers a new proposal according to which ignorance essentially involves not just the absence of a certain epistemic good, but also an intellectual failing of inquiry. We argue that Pritchard’s new proposal advances the discussion (...) of ignorance by incorporating insight from virtue epistemology, and hence the normative dimension of ignorance is properly noticed. Crucially, ignorance is no longer a mere static cognitive state, but also reflects the quality of inquiry and inquirers’ obligations. However, the new proposal faces two problems. First, current formulation is incomplete so that it cannot ground the epistemic blame that Pritchard requires. More details must be filled in. Second, his view would label all ignorance as normatively negative, and therefore locutions such as virtuous ignorance, blameless ignorance and the positive value of ignorance would be wrong. (shrink)

Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lacuna by (...) bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, it draws on the phenomenon of white ignorance, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk, on which the interests of one's epistemic community partly determine whether a belief‐forming procedure is epistemically risky. (shrink)

Many influential philosophers have claimed that truth is valuable, indeed so valuable as to be the ultimate standard of correctness for intellectual activity. Yet most philosophers also think that truth is only instrumentally valuable. These commitments make for a strange pair. One would have thought that an ultimate standard would enjoy more than just instrumental value. This paper develops a new argument for the non-instrumental value of truth: (1) inquiry is non-instrumentally valuable; and (2) truth inherits some of its value (...) from the value of inquiry. This makes truth finally but extrinsically valuable, a thesis that to my knowledge has not been directly defended in the literature. I support (1) by appeal to the notion of epistemic injustice, and (2) through the surprising claim that some goals get their value from the pursuit that aims at them. (shrink)