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Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. See Rosen (2003).

  2. See Husak (2016)

  3. See Fricker (2016) and Piovarchy (2021). For others who have defended the view that ignorance can serve as a legitimate excuse, either eliminating or greatly reducing a person’s blameworthiness for moral and legal transgressions, see Baron (2016), Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Kelly (2012), and Peels (2014). As suggested by Rosen’s account, the exculpatory power of ignorance disappears if we intentionally remain ignorant. For work on willful ignorance, see Husak and Callender (2010), Lynch (2016), Sarch (2018, 2019), Wieland (2017), and Zimmerman (2020), and for work on culpable ignorance more generally, see FitzPatrick (2008), Robichaud (2014), and Smith (1983).

  4. See Fine (2018), p. 4032. Others who adopt the Standard View include Blome-Tillman (2016), p. 96; Le Morvan (2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013, 2019); Lynch (2016), p. 509; Unger (1975), p. 93; and Zimmerman (1988), p. 75, and (2008), p. xi.

  5. For the purposes of this paper, I will assume that knowledge is not gradable. For positions on which knowledge can be gradable, however, see Hetherington (2001, 2011) and Sosa (2001, 2009, 2011).

  6. See Ryle (1949), p. 59.

  7. See Dretske (1981), p. 363. This thought, that factual knowledge does not come in degrees, has been used to defend various accounts of knowing that and knowing how. Using the premise that factual knowledge is not gradable, Ryle (1949) has argued that knowing how cannot be reduced to knowing that, while Jason Stanley (2004, 2005) has argued that knowledge contextualists cannot motivate their views by comparing the contextual variability of knowledge to the context-sensitivity of gradable expressions.

  8. See Brogaard (2016), p. 57.

  9. See Goldman and Olsson (2009), p. 21. Advocates of the New View include Goldman (1986), p. 26, and (1999), p. 5; Guerrero (2007), p. 63; Peels (2010), (2011), (2012), and (2014); and van Woudenberg (2009), p. 375.

  10. The Standard View and the New View are not the only accounts of ignorance. Brogaard’s objection may also cause problems for more recent understandings of ignorance, like Piedrahita’s (2021) access view or Silva and Siscoe’s (2024) awareness account, but because the Standard View and the New View are the most popular accounts of ignorance, those are the views which I will focus on here. For more on how the gradability objection affects Pritchard (2021a, 2021b) and Meylan’s (2020, 2024) views that ignorance is a failure of inquiry though, see Sect. 2.

  11. Another route for responding to Brogaard’s criticism is to appeal to contextualism about knowledge, arguing that ‘know’ is context-sensitive in ways that mirror the context sensitivity of ‘ignorant’. If this is right, then a distinct way to reconcile the gradability of ignorance with the Standard View would be to argue that knowledge and ignorance shift together across contexts. Because I’m persuaded that ‘ignorant’ is a partial absolute gradable adjective rather than a relative gradable adjective, however, I do not pursue this strategy here. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possible solution to Brogaard’s challenge.

  12. Some authors use ‘propositional ignorance’ to refer to what I have described as ‘facutal ignorance’, but I take them to be importantly distinct. In his work on ignorance, Le Morvan (2011b, 2012, 2013) distinguishes between ignorance of the content of a proposition and ignorance of a fact. In the first case, a person lacks a concept that prevents them from understanding the proposition in the first place, while in the second case, they understand the proposition even if they do not know whether it obtains.

  13. For more on the various types of ignorance, see Kyle (2021), Le Morvan and Peels (2016), Nottelmann (2016), and Silva and Siscoe (2024).

  14. See Pritchard (2021a, 2021b) and Meylan (2020, 2024).

  15. See Pritchard (2021b), pp. 237–238.

  16. See Unger (1975), p. 175, and Brogaard (2016), p. 58.

  17. See Areddy (2010), Dunning (2016), and Hooke (2021).

  18. See Lynch (2016), p. 511; Peels (2014), p. 479; and Wieland (2017), p. 106.

  19. Though for philosophers who have thought that factual ignorance is not gradable, see Nottelmann (2016), p. 52, and Olsson and Proietti (2016), p. 85.

  20. See Bamford (2005), Bianculli (2020), Boteach (2016), Clarke (2018), Jones (2017), Keertana (2012), and Usher (2014).

  21. See Brogaard (2016), p. 69–70. Brogaard’s official position is that ‘ignorant’ is a “moderately relative gradable adjective”, a term which she coins to distinguish some of the properties of ‘ignorant’ from other relative gradable adjectives. The differences between relative gradable adjectives and moderately relative gradable adjectives, however, will not be relevant for the arguments I make in this paper, so I will stick to the received terminology.

  22. Those who pioneered the distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives include Kennedy (2007), Kennedy and McNally (2005), and Rusiecki (1985). For more recent work on the relative/absolute distinction, see Burnett (2014, 2017).

  23. Those who hold that gradable adjectives makes use of a standard of comparison include Barker (2002), Bartsch and Vennemann (1972), Bierwisch (1989), Cresswell (1977), Fine (1975), Kamp (1975), Klein (1980), Lewis (1970), Pinkal (1995), Sapir (1944), and Wheeler (1972), while those who specifically argue that an object must “stand out” relative to the contextual threshold include Rotstein and Winter (2004), Kennedy (2007), and Kennedy and McNally (2005).

  24. For linguists who motivate and employ the “point to” test, see Kennedy (2007), Kyburg and Morreau (2000), Sedivy et al. (1999), and Syrett et al., (2006, 2010).

  25. A key contributor to the distinction between total and partial AAs is Rotstein and Winter (2004).

  26. For examples of the ‘slightly’ test, see Bylinina (2012), Kennedy (2007), Rotstein and Winter (2004), and Solt (2012).

  27. Those who employ the entailment test to distinguish between types of gradable adjectives include Kennedy (2007), Kennedy and McNally (2005), and Rotstein and Winter (2004).

  28. For more work on relative and absolute gradable adjectives in epistemology, see Beddor (2020a, b) on certainty; Hawthorne and Logins (2021), Fassio and Logins (2023), and Logins (2023) on justification; and Siscoe (2021a, b), (2022a, b), and (2023) on rationality.

  29. Even though I have spoken here strictly in terms of knowledge, if we instead suppose that the New View is correct, Overnight Rain can still be used as an example of degrees of ignorance. Rebecca truly believes that it rained last night, while Sarah merely believes that it might have rained, making Sarah more ignorant than Rebecca that it rained last night.

  30. Like before, Overnight Rain* can be adapted to make comparative judgments on the New View as well. If we suppose that Rebecca assigns a high credence to it raining overnight while Sarah assigns that proposition a low credence, then Rebecca comes closer than Sarah to truly believing that p.

  31. See Brogaard (2016), p. 57.

  32. See Boteach (2016) and Molefe (2015).

  33. See Brogaard (2016), p. 69.

  34. Ibid.

  35. For more on how semantic accounts attempt to represent the Sorites, see Graff Fara (2000), Kennedy (2007), Pinkal (1995), and Rusiecki (1985).

  36. See Brogaard (2016), p. 70.

  37. See Sorensen (1987), pp. 769–700.

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For feedback on previous iterations of this paper, I am grateful to Sven Bernecker, Michael Blome-Tillmann, Pierre Le Morvan, Rik Peels, Oscar Piedrahita, Duncan Pritchard, Paul Silva, Christopher Willard-Kyle, and an audience at CONCEPT at the University of Cologne.

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Siscoe, R.W. Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance. Philos Stud 181, 893–916 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02119-5

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