Brute ignorance

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110 (1):113-128 (2025)
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Abstract

We know a lot about what the world is like. We know less, it seems, about what we know about what the world is like. According to a common thought, it is easier for us to come to know about the state of the world than to come to know about the state of our own knowledge. What explains this gap? An attractively simple hypothesis is that our ignorance about what we know is explained by our ignorance about the world. There are things we fail to know about what we know about the world because there are things we fail to know about the world. This hypothesis is often motivated by the idea that knowledge requires a margin‐for‐error. In this paper, I'll argue that this simple hypothesis is inadequate. Not all our ignorance of our knowledge can be explained by our ignorance about the world. In this sense, at least some of our ignorance about what we know is brute.

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Sam Carter
University College London

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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Justification, knowledge, and normality.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1593-1609.
Vagueness.Timothy Williamson - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4):589-601.
The paradox of the preface.David Makinson - 1965 - Analysis 25 (6):205.

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