Epistemology of Ignorance

Our analysis is inspired by the fracas that arose around the second episode of the fourth Season of Netflix’s series Queer Eye, titled "Disabled But Not Really." This case will help us to articulate two important elements of microaggressions and to map the epistemic territory that polices the identity of disabled folks. Using this example, we will argue three things: First, central to conceptualizing microaggressions is understanding their mixed legibility. By this, we mean to suggest that crucial to the way that microaggressions function is that they are poised to deliver different messages to different audiences or multi-tiered messages to general audiences. Second, this mixed legibility is what allows microaggressions to be leveraged as part of a complex epistemology of domination that takes advantage of various mechanisms/element of epistemic oppression that are articulated in a growing literature (see literature review in the introduction to this volume). Finally, exploring the terrain of ableist microaggressions most clearly reveals how they can serve as a tool for maintaining the oppressive epistemologies that police the identities of disabled folk, but this role is not unique to them. In the first section, our argument will articulate how we understand “microaggression” and offer a clarifying augmentation of that account. In section two, we briefly locate ourselves within the literature attempting to define disability, then talk through how our analysis connects with the very few discussions of microaggressions within the context of disability. In section three, we introduce the case of “Disabled But Not Really.” In the fourth section, we leverage our previous analysis to show how microaggressions’ mixed legibility is crucial to their role in maintaining an epistemology that polices disability in general and disabled people in particular. We will close by discussing the ramifications this has for future analysis of both microaggressions and disability.

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed.

Lay understanding and scientific accounts of female sexuality and orgasm provide a fertile site for demonstrating  the importance of including epistemologies of ignorance within feminist epistemologies.  Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty. Studying both feminist and nonfeminist understandings of female orgasm reveals practices that suppress or erase bodies of knowledge concerning women's sexual pleasures.

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker's (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker's work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color's epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker's whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism.

Published in Nordic Journal of Migration Research Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017: DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-0013

Abstract: Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called 'racist liquorice', the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how 'epistemologies of ignorance' of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

https://journal-njmr.org/articles/abstract/10.1515/njmr-2017-0013/

This book offers a comprehensive philosophical investigation of ignorance. Using a set of cognitive tools and models, it discusses features that can describe a state of ignorance if linked to a particular type of cognition affecting the agent’s social behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity. The author defines ignorance as a cognitive condition that can be either passively (and unconsciously) borne by an agent or actively nurtured by him or her, and a condition that entails epistemic limitations (which can be any lack of knowledge, belief, information or data) that affect the agent’s behavior, belief system, and inferential capacity.



The author subsequently describes the ephemeral nature of ignorance, its tenacity in the development of human inferential and cognitive performance, and the possibility of sharing ignorance among human agents within the social dimension. By combining previous frameworks such as the naturalization of logic, the eco-cognitive perspective in philosophy and concepts from Peircean epistemology, and adding original ideas derived from the author’s own research and reflections, the book develops a new cognitive framework to help understand the nature of ignorance and its influence on the human condition.

With an innovative perspective on the social character of ignorance production, agnotology has been a fruitful approach for understanding the social and epistemological consequences of the interaction between industry and scientific research. In this paper, I argue that agnotology, or the study of ignorance, contributes to a better understanding of commercially driven research and its societal impact, showing the ways in which industrial interests have reshaped the epistemic aims of traditional scientific practices, turning them into mechanisms of ignorance production. To do so, I examine some of the main contributions to agnotology and provide a taxonomy of practices of ignorance construction common in commercially driven research today. In particular, I present the tobacco industry’s campaign against the health hazards of smoking as a paradigmatic case of ignorance production, identifying five central strategies. I then argue that the same strategies have been used in three other cases—global warming, pharmaceuticals, and the 2008 financial crisis.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the construction and exploitation of ignorance, with the establishment of a field of agnotology (ignorance studies). This effort has focused almost exclusively on governments and corporations, though little or none on religion. After exploring work in agnotology and introducing the concept of agnomancy (the creation or conjuring of ignorance), the present article offers a preliminary application of these perspectives to religion, investigating what light agnotology sheds on religion and when and for what reasons religion engages in agnomancy.

I argue against the Standard View of ignorance, according to which ignorance is defined as equivalent to lack of knowledge, that cases of environmental epistemic luck, though entailing lack of knowledge, do not necessarily entail ignorance. In support of my argument, I contend that in cases of environmental luck an agent retains what I call epistemic access to the relevant fact by successfully exercising her epistemic agency and that ignorance and non-ignorance, contrary to what the Standard View predicts, are not modal in the sense that knowledge is. After responding to objections, I conclude by sketching an alternative account of ignorance centered on the notions of epistemic access and epistemic agency.

This is a paper that was published July 22nd, 2018, in the Los Angeles Review of Books,  as part of a dossier on Rorty to commemorate a decade since his death. I wonder what Rorty would have said about "fake news" and "alternative facts," and the "death of truth" in our times of mendacity and presidential lies.

This essay argues that, after studying law, Clarice Lispector never abandoned her engagement with political theory, and shows that her fiction and chronicles were a continuation of her philosophy of law by other means. Lispector developed an epistemology of ignorance through the analysis of two key social practices: "choreographies of consent" and "orchestrated oblivion." In light of a 1941 article published in a law school journal, the essay traces the development of Lispector's increasingly complex conceptions of law and examines how she adapted them when historical events forced her to confront willful ignorance as a pervasive condition of possibility for the social reproduction of injustice.

‘Women’s knowledge’ is crucial to the formation of the Coetzeean autobiographical self. Summertime – the final volume of J M Coetzee’s trilogy of ‘fictionalised memoir’, Scenes from Provincial Life – becomes a positive way through the impasse of what Coetzee-the-critic refers to as ‘secular confession.’ This term denotes the crisis of self-knowledge opened up by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, where the Romantic notion of authenticity as an ultimate truth value dispensed with the pivotal role of the Other in any activity of truth-telling (Coetzee, 1985). The experimental form of Summertime demonstrates not an anti-autobiography (Jones, 2009), but rather a way to force a crisis for the norm of authenticity at the core of the modern autobiographical genre. This act critically undermines the autobiographer’s autocracy over the truth of the self. Insofar as the autobiographer’s power is entwined with, and reinforced by, male power, Summertime strategises ways to pick apart male power also. It is thus arguably a feminist text. In any case, it can be shown that Summertime valorises the function of the frank speech of women in forming the ethical substance of the autobiographical self. Summertime offers up its program of truth-telling as a means out of the trap of Rousseauian self-deception.

Does philosophy ignore disability, and if so, what results? The last few years have witnessed a surge in various literatures and spaces dedicated to talking and thinking about the philosophy of disability, and to the work and experiences of disabled philosophers. This might seem, on the face of it, to invalidate any claim that philosophy ignores disability. But this conclusion, I suggest, would be false. I argue that we can demonstrate that academic philosophy, and academia in general, has a tendency, in some important contexts at least, to ignore disability. I consider a story of one disabled student’s attempt to win funding for a philosophy PhD. This case study allows us to model three ways that philosophy ignores disability: first, by ‘presuming absent’ disabled philosophers and prospective disabled philosophers in crucial academic spaces such as interview rooms such that they become ‘unexpected bodies’; second, by failing to acknowledge the disproportionate burdens placed on disabled philosophers to participate in and access philosophical spaces; and third, by erasing or downplaying the significance of structural institutional arrangements in the production of these outcomes. In the final part of the paper, I draw on models for theorising ignorance offered by Charles Mills and Kristie Dotson to explore the characterisation of these phenomena as ‘ways of ignoring’ and identify three key aspects of the way that philosophy ignores disability: systematically, perniciously, and in a way that both causes and constitutes oppression. I argue that, at the very least, these ways of ignoring manifest Kristie Dotson’s notion of ‘epistemic oppression’. I conclude by drawing on Charles Mills’s ‘epistemology of ignorance’ to sketch an argument for the stronger claim that ignorance’s role in the production of oppression is not limited to the merely or distinctively epistemic. On this view, philosophy’s ‘ignore-ance’ of disability reproduces disability as a system of oppression.

This article contributes toward the recalibration of the human science disciplines within an emerging historical conjuncture increasingly free of Western hegemony enabling an “epochal shift” with the re-emergence of Tricontinental nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America, thus necessitating the reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production. The article argues for the delinking of disciplinary practice from the prevailing Euro-American epistemological hegemony currently in the throes of an epistemic panic induced by the inextricable nexus between Western power’s post-imperial detumescence and the discipline’s institutional senescence. The discipline’s adoption of neo-liberalism as its default paradigm has consolidated its surrender to the philosophical purview of “racial liberalism” and its derivative “epistemology of ignorance.” The latter’s epistemic legacy is the hegemony of metropolitan travelling theories and their credo of interpretivism that generate knowledge claims as imported theory-mediated mystifications of cultural others. The article seeks to redeem disciplinary practice from the resulting cognitive dysfunctions and moral liabilities, by proposing an alternative conception of the practice of anthropology as a field science of the human condition based on mesography as a new research ethic. Mesography is an integrative research framework for the human/social sciences in quest of historically embedded and empirically-grounded explanations of human predicaments in an axial era heralding new vectors of societal transformation. As such, it represents a “paradigmatic leap” that offers a methodological alternative to the tyranny of an anachronistic ethnography and an epistemological exit from the hegemony of an exhausted West-stream anthropology.

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-proposi-tional 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.

The starting point of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science is epistemological humility: We are ignorant and prone to error. This much may seem trivially true, but Popper (e.g., 1963: Ch. 1)  thought that it had too often been neglected. Such neglect, particularly for philosophers of science, is egregious because it is our ignorance of the world that makes science itself necessary. We need science not only because the world is vast and we are not, but because our senses do not infallibly yield the truth about the parts of the world with which we come into contact.
Science is for Popper a middle way between ignorance and knowledge, an alternative to both epistemological pessimism and optimism. The pessimist is impressed with human fallibility and ignorance, as Popper was. But if we thought that it was not just difficult but impossible to gain access to the truth, there would be no point in doing science. On the other hand, if we were able to get at the truth easily, as the optimist holds, then science would be unnecessary. Common sense would do.
....

I argue that political philosopher Charles W. Mills' twin concepts of 'the epistemology of ignorance' and 'white ignorance' are useful tools for thinking through racial injustice in the British education system. While anti-racist work in British education has a long history, racism persists in British primary, secondary and tertiary education. For Mills, the production and reproduction of racism relies crucially on cognitive and epistemological processes that produce ignorance, and which promote various ways of ignoring the histories and legacies of European colonialism and imperialism, as well as the testimonies and scholarship of those who experience racism in their everyday lives. I survey these concepts within Mills' work then marshal evidence in support of my claim that 'the epistemology of ignorance' and 'white ignorance' provide a useful framework for thinking through problems of racial injustice in British education.

I argue that critical social epistemologists, such as Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills, should not adopt conceptualism about mental content. Specifically, I argue that Adorno's thesis of "the non-identity of concept and object" accounts for the tension between moral belief and moral perception that is necessary for critical social epistemology to be genuinely critical. Moreover, Adorno's nonvoluntaristic conception of agency and autonomy shows that overcoming what Fricker calls "hermeneutic injustice" is itself an expression of autonomy.

Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called ‘racist liquorice’, the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

This paper investigates the relation (if any) between my ignoring a fact and my ignorance of it. Does my ignoring, say, that my remarks are hurting her feelings hold any tight, necessary, relation with my being ignorant of this fact? This question has some interesting repercussion for a recent discussion between El Kassar (2018) and Peels (2019) regarding how to accommodate two apparently incompatible conceptions of "ignorance"-the stative and the agential conception of ignorance-that are both present in the philosophical literature.

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects' doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations' members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

This paper attempts to place Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ’ in a more objective context, by focusing on establishing the real significance of Gibson’s film in the light of Christianity’s theological import and its possible interpretation(s) for a contemporary Western world.  In this regard, the film is evaluated from a number of interrelated perspectives, viz.: Gibson’s avowed intentions, historical accuracy, written gospel accuracy, Catholic sectarian accuracy, contemporary Catholic accuracy and most importantly, the phenomenon of the film itself.

The author concludes that Gibson, who clearly views his faith through the mediation of often violent film imagery, rather than serious theological insights, has pandered to the needs of a cinema-going public that is largely incapable of responding to subtlety because it has become visually punch-drunk by so much celluloid brutality and technological special effects. As a result, this film undermines its own purpose of conversion to Christianity due to its message of hate, violence and bigotry.  In addition, it has the potential to undermine any reconciliation between Jewish and Christian groups.

In the 1960s and 1970s, philosophers and theorists of assorted stripes (e.g., Kuhn, Foucault, Rorty, and proponents of the "Strong Programme" in the sociology of science) converged in their attacks on traditional epistemology, intent on supplanting its "rationalist" focus on truth and objectivity by emphasizing the social, historical, and material dimensions of knowledge. However, "social epistemology" as a term was not in wide circulation until 1987, when – for a special issue of the journal Synthese – Alvin Goldman and Steve Fuller both appropriated the label for their respective visions of what this emerging field might be. Steeped in the analytic tradition, Goldman conceived of social epistemology as an extension of traditional "veritistic" epistemology, but concerned specifically with social epistemic evaluation (e.g., testimony, peer disagreement). In contrast, Fuller's "constructivist" vision of social epistemology, based on the "Science and Technology Studies" (STS) model, heralded a new synthesis among interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. The discord between these competing programs regarding methods and aims – hardened through the Science Wars – led to a state of mutual neglect if not outright hostility. Moreover, in the wake of Bruno Latour's turn to ontology (e.g., Actor-Network Theory), STS became increasingly indifferent to epistemological matters and concerns. In our seminar, we examine the interruption of the relationships between these approaches, and explore avenues to their rapprochement. Those include recent work in social moral epistemology and the epistemology of extended and socially distributed cognition.

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WHAT IF......


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUW0AoZWYAEwZ4u?format=jpg&name=medium.........


Satan, became 'Lucifer the Enlightened One'-the genesis of wokeness-when He realized the extent of the dissembling dishonesty for the pettiness of power and control WAS the foundation of the Omniscient-Omnipotent
Ones Majesty [OOOM]. Then the "Fall of Eve" was actually the Woke informing Eve of Her inherent right of emancipation from ANY power or principality, let alone Adam, the tool of that omniscient and omnipotent illusion.

Every Thing/One since of which of which and by which "maturity" is defined is the wretched heirs subordinated to the Omnipotent-Omniscient-Majesty of false Illusions lived and procreated by "They who know not what they do".

In this talk, I draw upon current work on virtue and vice epistemology to argue that certain pathologies of public discourse can be usefully understood using the concept of epistemic corruption. The first part of the talk presents an account of this concept, while the second provides a concrete case study of epistemic corruption in public discourse — namely, the concerted attacks on climate scientists by a variety of economically and ideologically motivated ‘doubt-mongers’, of the sort described by Eric Conway and Naomi Oreskes. I end by replying to some worries about epistemic corruption, and argue that applying it to public discourse will require integration of epistemological and empirical researches.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the construction and exploitation of ignorance, with the establishment of a field of agnotology (ignorance studies). This effort has focused almost exclusively on governments and corporations, though little or none on religion. After exploring work in agnotology and introducing the concept of agnomancy (the creation or conjuring of ignorance), the present article offers a preliminary application of these perspectives to religion, investigating what light agnotology sheds on religion and when and for what reasons religion engages in agnomancy.

I am interested in looking at early colonialist discourse in the Americas from the vantage point of a primary source document, a sixteenth-century chronicle. My  hypothesis is that hegemonic rhetoric can be constructed through an assembly of contrived ignorance bolstered with an attitude of arrogance, as can be detected in Agustín Zarate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Peru, which was not unique in that time but, rather, was paradigmatic of mainstream ideas. Readers can then draw their own conclusions about the relevance of sixteenth-century imperial strategies to our time, but I do emphasize some parallels between Spanish colonialism and Anglo-American neocolonialism because commonalities are pertinent. Moreover, this approach of inserting Spanish colonialism into a framework  with Anglo-American neocolonialism works against the unexamined bias in English-language documents through the centuries known as the Black Legend