Ignorance and awareness

Noûs 58 (1):225-243 (2024)
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Abstract

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.

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Author Profiles

Paul Silva Jr.
University of Cologne
Wes Siscoe
Bowling Green State University

Citations of this work

Awareness by degree.Paul Silva Jr & Robert Weston Siscoe - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110 (1):172-200.
Awareness.Paul Silva - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.

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References found in this work

What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon (ed.) - 1998 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Epistemic Akrasia.Sophie Horowitz - 2013 - Noûs 48 (4):718-744.
The Intellectual Given.John Bengson - 2015 - Mind 124 (495):707-760.
Skepticism and the Veil of Perception.Michael Huemer - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1):234-237.

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