Awareness of ignorance

SATS 20 (2):141-173 (2020)
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Abstract

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.

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Ilhan Inan
Koc University

Citations of this work

A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity.İlhan İnan - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Routledge.

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References found in this work

Origins of Objectivity.Tyler Burge - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Frege’s Puzzle (2nd edition).Nathan U. Salmon - 1986 - Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.
On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism.Peter K. Unger - 1975 - Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press.
The Problems of Philosophy.Bertrand Russell - 1912 - Portland, OR: Home University Library.

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