Abstract
I argue that the Standard View of ignorance is at odds with the claim that knowledge entails truth. In particular, if knowledge entails truth then we cannot explain away some apparent absurdities that arise from the Standard View of ignorance. I then discuss a modified version of the Standard View, which simply adds a truth requirement to the original Standard View. I show that the two main arguments for the original Standard View fail to support this modified view.
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Notes
(KT) should be distinguished from a similar thesis criticized by Allan Hazlett (2010, 2012). Hazlett does not reject (KT), but instead rejects a linguistic thesis about the ordinary use of the word ‘knows’. He rejects the linguistic thesis that ordinary utterances of ‘S knows that P’ are true only if P. According to Hazlett, this linguistic thesis cannot be a reason for accepting (KT). Nevertheless, Hazlett holds that “epistemologists have every right” to accept (KT) as long as they don’t rely on the linguistic thesis just mentioned (2010, p. 500).
See also Le Morvan and Peels for additional support for the grammaticality of (b). As they note, the Oxford English Dictionary specifies that ‘ignorant’ can be used alongside a subordinate clause, and the OED cites this example in support: “I am ignorant that till now, I ever made you this offer” (2017, p. 18, fn.16).
Otherwise it would be impossible to know what the phrase means prior to knowing x’s truth-value.
See Nottelmann (2017) for details on these kinds of ignorance. Even if these other kinds of ignorance are reducible to factual ignorance, the reduction won’t be so simplistic as to require that Sherman is factually ignorant that phrenology is true.
On this approach, modes tollens would be an invalid inference to draw from both (KT) and (IT). .
See also Hazlett (2012, p. 464) for another case.
‘S is ignorant that the Earth is flat’ is not an apparent absurdity. Although this sentence sounds strange to our ears, there are contexts where it can be uttered without any air of inconsistency—i.e. a context where the speaker believes that the Earth is flat, but S does not.
Unlike apparent contradictions, apparent absurdities cannot disappear merely by reasoning them through. Suppose a proponent of the Standard View reasons as follows: (2) is equivalent to (1), (1) is not a contradiction, therefore (2) is also not a contradiction. And suppose that, as a result of this reasoning, (2) no longer appears to this person to be a contradiction. Nevertheless, (2) may still be an apparent absurdity, because this reasoning in no way creates a context where (2) can be felicitously uttered. Notice that one could reason analogously regarding a Moorean sentence, but this wouldn’t create a context where the Moorean sentence can be felicitously uttered.
This claim can be weakened, and my main argument would go through just the same. The weaker claim is just that there are some contexts where a #-sentence carries an air of inconsistency but its corresponding equivalent does not. This would be enough to establish that the IT* Explanation (in section 4.2) requires that P is a detachable implication of ‘ignorant that P’.
The overall proof assumes a necessary condition for knowing-whether, such as: S knows whether P only if either S knows that P or S knows that ¬P. Assuming this principle, along with (KT), (IT), and (NEC), we can derive a contradiction from (2). Alternatively, we need not assume (KT) if we appeal to a slightly different necessary condition for knowing-whether: S knows whether P only if [if P then S knows that P]. Granting this principle, we need only assume (IT) and (NEC) to derive a contradiction from (2).
This implication most likely arises because ‘knows’ is a factive verb whose implied propositional contents are constant under negation.
The fact that (8) contains a negation makes no difference here, since negations are “holes”—they allow detachable implications to project freely. Typically, this is said of presupposition, but also for conventional implicature and other detachable implications.
The converse claim is false. It’s false that if P is a detachable implication of the negation then it’s also a detachable implication of the affirmative. It-cleft constructions are counterexamples. The negation ‘It was not John who solved the problem’ has the detachable implication that someone solved the problem; but the affirmative ‘It was John who solved the problem’ entails that someone solved it.
Most of these examples are instances of either conventional implicature or presupposition, although the precise mechanism makes no difference for our purposes. One example is a conversational implicature that stems from the maxim of Manner.
We cannot deem (7) a negative sentence merely on the grounds that it’s truth-conditionally equivalent to a negated sentence (according to the Standard View). Every sentence is truth-conditionally equivalent to a negated sentence, given that we can always add double-negation.
Nikolaj Nottelmann adds another condition to the Modified Standard View—that S must be “an epistemic subject” (2017, p. 34). What I say about the Modified Standard View applies equally to Nottelmann’s view. .
A third argument involves an attempt at explaining what propositional ignorance is, given that one can be propositionally ignorant of false propositions. I don’t discuss this argument directly, because my response to the Unification Argument suffices as a response to this third argument. See footnote 27 for an explanation of the argument and my response.
And even some persons are neither courageous nor cowardly—e.g. foolhardy persons.
One must also claim that truth is entailed by the cognate in the other language, but this is likely as contentious as the claim that ignorance entails truth.
Nottelmann holds that this requirement involves skillful φ-ing, but I will omit this for brevity’s sake.
This formulation presupposes that each kind of knowledge has only one success condition. If this assumption is incorrect, (GBV) can be modified to accommodate multiple success conditions (e.g. ‘failure to believe one of K’s success conditions’).
This provides a response to a third argument for the Standard View, and against the Belief View. The argument is just that the Belief View cannot make sense of how a subject can be propositionally ignorant of false propositions (see Le Morvan and Peels 2017, pp. 22–25). The Standard View can make sense of this, because propositional ignorance is arguably a specific form of objectual ignorance (Le Morvan 2015, p. 3650), and the Standard View has no trouble accounting for objectual ignorance. In reply, (GBV) provides a way of explaining objectual ignorance which is amenable to the Belief View. So, the Belief View can mirror the Standard View’s explanation for how a subject can be propositionally ignorant of false propositions.
S fails to believe any correct answer to a question Q if and only if for every proposition P such that P is a correct answer to Q, S does not believe P.
Indeed, I provide a counterexample to (GBV) in Kyle (2015, p. 1498).
A reviewer has suggested the following way of explaining away the intuitions about Gettier cases: ‘S is ignorant that P’ conversationally implicates that S lacks a high epistemic status, which is false in a Gettier case. However, since conversational implicatures are non-detachable, it follows from the Modified Standard View that ‘doesn’t know the true proposition P’ carries the same implicature—i.e. it also conversationally implicates that the Gettier subject lacks a high epistemic status. So, this explanation falsely predicts that we should be reluctant to deny knowledge of the Gettier subject. I address, and reject, other potential explanations in Kyle (2015, pp. 1501–1502).
One might think arguments are unnecessary, since the Modified Standard View gains support from intuition. But I argue in Kyle (2015, pp. 1510–1515) that this intuitive support can be explained away by citing conversational implicatures.
Special gratitude goes the Stockdale Center at the U.S. Naval Academy for their generous support, which allotted me enough time to write this article. My gratitude also goes to three anonymous reviewers whose comments ultimately strengthened the argument in this paper. I also thank Matthew McGrath for insightful discussions regarding this argument. And finally, I thank the participants of the 2018 International Colloquium on Analytic Epistemology and Social Epistemology Conference (Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil), where an early version of this paper was presented. The viewpoints expressed in this article do not reflect the official positions of any U.S. government agency.
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Kyle, B.G. Truth and ignorance. Synthese 198, 7739–7762 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02546-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02546-x