Ignorance

It seems to me ignorance is all we have. We take action to dispel our ignorance by learning. We fear the dark because we are ignorant of what lies out there. What I did not know was there was a subfield of philosophy on the subject, I thought all of philosophy was about our ignorance,

Then I read What Don’t We Know? We have a lot to learn from studying our ignorance by Joshua Rothman:

DeNicola’s book is an entry in a subfield of philosophy called “agnotology”—the study of ignorance. As philosophical subfields go, agnotology sounds abstract and even a little contradictory: what could it even mean to study what’s unknown? And yet, because ignorance is actually an everyday condition from which we all suffer, the study of it is quite down to earth. Have you ever been in a bookstore, leafed through a weighty tome, and then returned it to the shelf? You are practicing “rational ignorance,” DeNicola writes, by making “the more-or-less conscious decision that something is not worth knowing—at least for me, at least not now.” (In an information-rich society, he notes, knowing when to maintain this kind of ignorance is actually an important skill.) Have you ever tuned out a gossipy friend because you don’t want to know who said what about whom? Deciding that you’d rather be above the fray is “strategic ignorance”; you embrace it because it will make life better, deploying it when you decide not to read the reviews before seeing a movie, or conduct a hiring process in which the names of the candidates are obscured. There’s a big difference between strategic ignorance and what DeNicola calls “involuntary” ignorance: “In the iconic image, Justice is blindfolded, not blind,” he writes.

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One of the benefits of studying your ignorance, DeNicola shows, is that you can calibrate it. Maybe you’d like to be less ignorant about your mother’s job, or more ignorant about your roommate’s relationships. DeNicola asks us to imagine a man who goes to a new restaurant and orders the soup. It’s delicious! But the restaurant serves a strange cuisine from a country that he’s never visited, and he’s a picky eater. He might decide that he doesn’t want to know what’s in the soup. The problem is that the acceptability of our ignorance depends on our identities and goals. What if he’s a vegetarian? In that case, he might be compromising his principles by not knowing the ingredients. What if he has a food allergy? He might be taking a deadly risk. In Henry James’s novel “The Portrait of a Lady,” an heiress named Isabel Archer moves from America to Europe, where she falls for and marries Gilbert Osmond, another expat who seems especially sensitive and refined. Unsure of herself and decorous to a fault, Isabel doesn’t ask too many questions about Osmond’s past; she doesn’t press him, for instance, for the name of the mother of his fifteen-year-old daughter. And of course Isabel discovers, eventually, that Osmond has married her for her money at the urging of his mistress, who is the girl’s mother. Isabel’s willful ignorance was miscalibrated. And yet you can’t always ask what’s in the soup.

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In a recent book called “Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity,” a German philosopher named Markus Gabriel argues that our personhood is partly based on ignorance—that “to be someone, to be a subject, is to be wrong about something.” It’s intuitive to hold the opposite view—to say that we are the sum of what we know. But Gabriel points out that, even when you know something to be true, you probably also know that there are aspects of it about which you’re probably wrong. I encountered this phenomenon recently when my son asked me to explain the meaning of “E=mc2”—but, also, when I tried to tell him about how I’d met his mom. “We were riding up in an elevator, and we started talking, and then she got off,” I said. “And then, later, when I was riding down, she got back on.”

Much to think about, and much to work on. 

 sch 8/8