Epistemology of Ignorance

This article discusses two under-explored strands to the concept of ignorance. Firstly, how ignorance relates to a subject's degrees of belief; secondly how ignorance relates to a subject's evidence. I also consider a third alleged strand to the concept of ignorance, which is that ignorance requires some kind of normative failure. I argue that this is false; ignorance does not essentially require any such failure. I finish with some reflections on the extent to which conceptual analysis and linguistic intuitions about the English language concept 'ignorance' can be relied upon to illuminate the nature of ignorance itself.

This paper examines the visual and formal characteristics of student protest slogans that emerged during the wave of university blockades and mass demonstrations in Serbia that played a pivotal role in shaping Serbia's socio-political landscape from late 2024 through 2025. As a continuation of previous research focused on slogan content, this study shifts the analytical focus to the visual dimension of protest communication. The analysis is based on a dataset of 929 photographs of protest banners collected between December 2024 and February 2025 across 35 faculties at five universities in Serbia. Using a deductive coding approach, the study explores features such as script type, language, text-image interplay, and the distinction between internal and external banners. Findings show that most slogans were written in Serbian and predominantly used Cyrillic script, often combining text with visual elements to enhance symbolic impact. The use of national script functioned both as an identity marker and as a strategy of symbolic resistance. Visual stylisation, multimodal composition, and emotional vocabulary played a crucial role in shaping public perception and internal group solidarity. Protest slogans thus operated as multimodal forms of symbolic struggle, linking visual design with political critique in a context of shrinking democratic space.

This paper examines the claim that religious belief reflects the free will of individuals to accept or reject a true God. By analyzing the global distribution of religions, it becomes evident that belief patterns overwhelmingly follow cultural and geographical boundaries rather than independent choice (Gervais & Najle, 2015; Willard, 2013). The persistence of inherited traditions, reinforced by social pressures and cognitive predispositions,

This paper examines the visual and formal characteristics of student protest slogans that emerged during the wave of university blockades and mass demonstrations in Serbia that played a pivotal role in shaping Serbia's socio-political landscape from late 2024 through 2025. As a continuation of previous research focused on slogan content, this study shifts the analytical focus to the visual dimension of protest communication. The analysis is based on a dataset of 929 photographs of protest banners collected between December 2024 and February 2025 across 35 faculties at five universities in Serbia. Using a deductive coding approach, the study explores features such as script type, language, text-image interplay, and the distinction between internal and external banners. Findings show that most slogans were written in Serbian and predominantly used Cyrillic script, often combining text with visual elements to enhance symbolic impact. The use of national script functioned both as an identity marker and as a strategy of symbolic resistance. Visual stylisation, multimodal composition, and emotional vocabulary played a crucial role in shaping public perception and internal group solidarity. Protest slogans thus operated as multimodal forms of symbolic struggle, linking visual design with political critique in a context of shrinking democratic space.

Philosophical work on values in science is held back by widespread ambiguity about how values bear on scientific choices. Here, I disambiguate several ways in which a choice can be value-laden and show that this disambiguation has the potential to solve and dissolve philosophical problems about values in science. First, I characterize four ways in which values relate to choices: values can motivate, justify, cause, or be impacted by the choices we make. Next, I put my proposed taxonomy to work, using it to clarify one version of the argument from inductive risk. The claim that non-epistemic values must play a role in scientific choices that run inductive risk makes most sense as a claim about values being needed to justify such choices. The argument from inductive risk is not unique: many philosophical arguments about values in science can be more clearly understood and assessed by paying close attention to how values and choices are related.

Isidora Jarić holds PhD in Sociology. Full Professor on Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Throughout her carrier she has been involved in many internationally and nationally supported research and capacity building projects. Since the focus of her professional expertise are the issues of education, gender and health her researches are predominantly concentrate on the minority, marginal and vulnerable groups. She has been a consultant on a considerable number or projects, as well as the team leader of several national and international research projects. She is the author of three monographs:

In his recent monograph--Ignorance: A Philosophical Study, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)--Rik Peels offers a critique of the normative account of ignorance that I have developed and defended. I hereby respond to that critique. I argue that Peels' response, even by its own lights, in fact concedes far more to the idea that there is a normative condition on ignorance than he realises. Indeed, I conclude that Peels would be wise to embrace the normative condition on ignorance that I propose and try to incorporate it into his own theory of ignorance.

Los ensayos de Antoni Brey, Daniel Innerarity y Gonçal Mayos recogidos en el presente volumen constituyen una síntesis lúcida de nuestro comportamiento social como especie. La evolución exponencial de nuestros procesos de regulación energética, la aplicación técnica de los mismos, así como el crecimiento demográfico están produciendo una situación de incertidumbre sobre nuestro futuro en el planeta.
La hiperconexión que se produce como consecuencia de la socialización de la revolución científico-técnica nos hace incrementar la complejidad en los procesos de relación social de especie, como nunca antes se había producido.
La complejidad que ha emergido es un producto evolutivo y no se puede gestionar, en contra de lo que algunos especímenes humanos piensan; lo único que podemos hacer como Homo sapiens, para enfrentarnos al futuro, es trabajar para poder manejar la incertidumbre planteando escenarios hipotéticos y aplicando modelos que, en cualquier caso, deberán contrastarse empíricamente.
La tecnología y su socialización generan tensiones y divisiones en nuestras estructuras etológicas y culturales. No se ha producido, pues, una socialización efectiva del conocimiento y ello impide que caminemos hacia la sociedad del pensamiento, tal como deberíamos hacer.
Por lo tanto, las dicotomías históricas continúan en pleno progreso y ni los expertos ni los eruditos ni tampoco los sabios tienen bastante capacidad para integrar la información de que disponemos. El individualismo debe dejar paso a la individualidad, es decir, las personas hemos de actuar no como especímenes, si no como constructores sociales, aportando de forma crítica nuestros conocimientos a la organización de la especie. Esto, por ahora, no es así, a pesar de la socialización de la cultura y de la educación.
Actualmente, como dice Antoni Brey en su opúsculo, nos invade la sociedad de la ignorancia. A pesar de ello, soy optimista y mantengo la esperanza de que todo sea consecuencia del momento de transición en que nos hallamos inmersos, como un capítulo pasajero de nuestra travesía hacia una mejora ecológica y cultural de nuestra especie.
Ahora bien, para que realmente lleguemos a este punto, debemos trabajar en la perspectiva de generar una nueva conciencia crítica de especie. Solamente con una evolución responsable, construida a través del progreso consciente, podremos convertir conocimiento en pensamiento, alejándonos de este modo de la sociedad de la ignorancia.
Eudald Carbonell Roura

If we come across one person unjustifiably hurting another, it is not clear that we should be much, or at all, concerned by the fact that the perpetrator is getting blisters on his hand in the process. Indeed, we believe that this is precisely the way to describe the phenomena with which Benatar is concerned: men are hurting themselves in the process of hurting women." As one would expect from David Benatar, his new book is clear, well-written, and tantalizingly contentious. It is also misguided, superficial, and, ultimately, very difficult to take seriously. The central claim of Benatar's book is that, throughout history and at present throughout the world, men and boys have become the victims of pervasive and disadvantageous discrimination; hence a "second sexism" that targets men. Although he is at pains not to compare the extent of discrimination against females with that against males, his aim is nevertheless that of establishing some moral parity between the two. The book establishes neither of the two claims it sets out to defend--neither that men are the victims of pervasive discrimination, nor that there is any moral parity between discrimination against women and that (supposed by Benatar) against men.

Disinformation is a growing epistemic threat, yet its connection to understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, I argue that understandingspecifically, understanding how things work and why they work the way they docan, all else being equal, shield individuals from disinformation campaigns. Conversely, a lack of such understanding makes one particularly vulnerable. Drawing on Simion's (2023) characterization of disinformation as content that has a disposition to generate or increase ignorance, I propose that disinformation frequently exploits a preexisting lack of understanding. I consider an important objectionthat since understanding is typically difficult to acquire, we might rely on deferring to experts. However, I argue that in epistemically polluted environments, where expertise is systematically mimicked, deference alone provides no reliable safeguard. I conclude by briefly reflecting on strategies for addressing these challenges, emphasizing both the need for promoting understanding and for cleaning up the epistemic environment.

In this response to my commentators, I address several challenges to the erotetic account of knowing what things are, developed in Knowing What Things Are: An Inquiry-Based Approach. I clarify how my view handles complex webs of inquiry, contextual variation in answers, and normative dimensions of questions involving social kinds. Drawing on cases such as “What is a gene?” and “What is marriage?”, I explore how different epistemic and practical goals shape what counts as a good answer to “What is x?” questions. I also respond to worries about over- and under-generation of knowledge attributions, and the possibility of non-propositional knowledge. Finally, I consider the implications of my contextualism for truth, content, and fictional discourse, and suggest refinements to the original framework to better accommodate issues raised by my critics.

Ignorance becomes a philosophical issue when it is first-personal, i.e., x's awareness about x's own ignorance. It raises exciting and apparently paradoxical questions about cognition. Keeping first-personal experience of ignorance at the centre, some Indian philosophical schools discuss extensively the nature of ignorance. Vya ¯satı ¯rtha from the Dualist school (Dvaita Veda ¯nta), along with the Nya ¯ya-Vais ´es ˙ika school propound that ignorance belongs to a negative category (abhāvapadārtha) or in other words, that it must be understood as an absence of some cognition. The Non-dualist school (Advaita Veda ¯nta) thinks that ignorance is not an absence of cognition, but a positive entity (bhāvarūpa) that obstructs our cognition. The first group objects for considering ignorance as a positive entity arguing that it leads to the problem of profligacy of ontological entities, whereas the Non-dualists argue that considering ignorance as an absence of cognition leads to contradictions in cases of first-personal experiences of ignorance. In this paper, I present a small segment of the extensive arguments from both sides, alongside two Western philosophical theories that support the views of the Dualists and the Nya ¯ya-Vais ´es ˙ika. Through a critical analysis of these arguments, I demonstrate that, with respect to the specific set of arguments examined, the view of ignorance as an absence of cognition fails to sufficiently account for cases of first-personal experiences of ignorance. In contrast, the Non-dualist conceptualization proves more robust, given its successful applicability to all instances of ignorance.

This book symposium comprises a précis of André J.
Abath’s book Knowing What Things Are: An Inquiry-Based Approach together with five critical commentaries on different aspects of the book—written by Veronica Campos, Guilherme Araújo Cardoso, Giulia Felappi, Ernesto Perini-Santos and Leonardo de Mello Ribeiro—, and the author’s replies.

Felsefe tarihinde Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464) Orta Çağ filozoflarının felsefi kavramları ile Rönesans felsefesinin yeni düşüncelerinin sentezini yapan 15. yüzyılın en özgün Alman filozofu olarak addedilmiştir. Cusanus genel olarak eserlerinde Tanrı, evren ve Mesih konularını ele alır. Ona göre bilmediğimizi ne kadar bilirsek o kadar bilgeliğe ulaşırız. İnsan Tanrı’nın ne olduğunu değil ne olmadığını bilebilir. Bu da doğal olarak Cusanus’u negatif teolojiye götürmüştür. Ancak Cusanus’un Hıristiyan bir filozof olduğu için negatif bir teolojiyi benimsemesi, bu dine uygun bir tutum değildir. Cusanus’ta pozitif veya negatif teolojide Tanrı hakkında konuşmak zorken, İsa’nın kendini ifşa etmesiyle bu mümkün hale gelmiştir. Bu yüzden Tanrı-insan ilişkisini Tanrı’nın Kelimesi İsa’da görmüştür. Çünkü İsa her iki doğayı kendinde birleştirmiştir. Cusanus, Hıristiyanlığın önemli kavramlarını felsefi zeminde sembolik bir dille izah yoluna gitmiştir. Bu çalışma Cusanus’un Sonsuz-sonlu ayrımı, zıtların birliği, öğrenilmiş cehalet gibi kavramları üzerinden meseleyi ele almaktadır.

In the history of philosophy, Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464) is considered to be the most original German philosopher of the 15th century, who synthesized the philosophical concepts of medieval philosophers with the new ideas of Renaissance philosophy. Cusanus generally deals with God, the universe and Christ in his works. According to him, the more we know what we do not know, the more wisdom we attain. One can know not what God is, but what God is not. This naturally led Cusanus to negative theology. However, Cusanus's adoption of a negative theology because he was a Christian philosopher is not an appropriate attitude to this religion. For Cusanus, it is difficult to talk about God in positive or negative theology, whereas it has become possible through Jesus' self-revelation. Therefore, he saw the God-human relationship in Jesus, the Word of God. Because Jesus united both natures in himself. Cusanus tried to explain the important concepts of Christianity on philosophical grounds with a symbolic language. This research addresses the issue through Cusanus' concepts such as the infinite-finite distinction, the unity of opposites, and learned ignorance.

Considerable attention in education and legal circles has focused on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Morse u. Frederick.l While this ruling answers some questions regarding students' expression rights, it provides little clarification about challenges to public school districts' policies or practices prohibiting harassing and demeaning expression. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court passed up a recent opportunity to provide guidance in this arena when it vacated the Ninth Circuit's decision in Harper u. Poway Unified School District without addressing the merits of the case.2 In the absence of clear Supreme Court guidance, lower court rulings in cases challenging such anti-harassment restrictions are difficult to reconcile with each other and with student expression litigation in general. These cases are particularly sensitive because they highlight the tension between the protection of students' First Amendment rights to freely express their views, including religious views, and school authorities' duty to maintain a respectful and civil school environment. Recent legal developments have left educators unsure regarding how to balance public schools' obligations and students' rights in terms of appropriate and protected expression in public schools. This Article revisits cases rendered since 2000 challenging school districts' anti-harassment restrictions. In Section I, the Supreme Court's rulings on students' free speech rights are briefly reviewed to provide a context regarding the governing legal principles. Section II examines two rulings of the Third Circuit as an example of how lower courts have applied • Chancellor's Professor and Chair, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University. 1. 127 S. Ct. 261H (2007). 2. 445 F.3d 1Hi6 (9th Cir. 2006). vacated and remanded with instructions to dismiss as moot. 127 S. Ct. 14H4 (2007). B.Y.U. EDUCATION AND LAW ,JOURNAL [2008 Supreme Court precedent to challenges to anti-harassment policies. Sections III and IV, respectively, discuss the inconsistencies among lower court rulings across circuits regarding displays of the Confederate flag and expressions of religious beliefs that demean homosexuality. Section V addresses possible future directions of litigation in this arena and reviews the meager guidance for school authorities that can be gleaned from the cases to date.

Recent work in ignorance studies teaches us that ignorance is not always negative but is also a necessary starting point for knowledge: it lies at the core of scientific research. If the idea that science rises from ignorance seems obvious, there is however little study on how ignorance drives science and on the forms it can take. Recognizing and analyzing its driving force can deepen both our understanding of the dynamics of scientific research and of the concept of ignorance. I show that scientific research follows a cycle of ignorance, and I offer an interpretative framework for the analysis of cases of scientific ignorance.

El artículo explora la intersección entre la tesis de la mente extendida y el transhumanismo, enfocándose, específicamente, en cómo las tecnologías pueden influir, alterar o expandir nuestras capacidades y habilidades cognitivas. A través de un análisis de la tesis de la mente extendida, que propone que algunos elementos externos pueden formar parte constitutiva de nuestros procesos cognitivos, se argumenta que el transhumanismo adopta dicha tesis al tratar el asunto del mejoramiento cognitivo, y se examina si la tecnología puede realmente mejorar nuestras capacidades mentales, o si, por el contrario, podría inducir a un tipo específico de ignorancia al hacernos perder la fenomenología cognitiva, es decir, la vivencia de nuestros procesos mentales o el aspecto fenoménico de nuestra conciencia cognitiva. Se cuestiona, además, si el acoplamiento con tecnologías cognitivas disminuiría nuestra capacidad de realizar tareas mentales de forma autónoma, sugiriendo que una dependencia excesiva de la tecnología podría reducir nuestra habilidad para realizar procesos cognitivos sin ayuda de artefactos tecnológicos. Luego del análisis, el artículo concluye que, efectivamente, nuestro acoplamiento con artefactos tecnológicos puede conducirnos a un tipo específico de ignorancia al eliminar nuestra fenomenología cognitiva. También determina que dicha ignorancia es síntoma de que el uso excesivo de tecnologías puede despojarnos de nuestra habilidad de realizar tareas cognitivas sin asistencia tecnológica. Estas dos conclusiones deberían minar, o al menos replantear, las aspiraciones transhumanistas acerca del mejoramiento tecnológico de nuestra mente.

This paper explores the intersection between the extended mind thesis and transhumanism, with a particular focus on how technology may influence, alter, or enhance human cognitive abilities. The extended mind thesis posits that external elements can become integral components of cognitive processes. Drawing on this notion, the paper contends that transhumanism adopts such perspective in advocating for the possibility of cognitive enhancement. In this sense, it assesses whether technology can truly improve cognitive function or whether it might, instead, induce a specific type of ignorance by diminishing cognitive phenomenology—the lived, experiential dimension of mental processes or the phenomenal aspect of cognitive consciousness. The assumption that cognitive technologies inherently enhance independent mental performance is challenged, with the argument that overreliance on technology may impair the ability to execute cognitive tasks autonomously. The analysis concludes that the integration of technological artifacts with human cognition can indeed lead to a specific form of ignorance by compromising cognitive phenomenology. It also suggests that such ignorance signals that the excessive use of technology may undermine the ability to perform cognitive tasks independently. These two conclusions invite reconsideration of the transhumanist claim that technology can improve human cognition.

In the recent epistemological literature much has been written about the nature of suspending judgement or agnosticism. There has also been a surge of recent interest in the nature of ignorance. But what is the relationship between these two epistemically significant states? Prima facie, both suspension and ignorance seem to involve the lack of a correct answer to a question. And, again prima facie, there may be some intuitive attraction to the idea that when one is ignorant whether p, one ought to suspend judgement whether p. In this paper we will explore a range of different possible normative connections between ignorance and suspension of judgement. We will also discuss how both ignorance and suspension are related to having inconclusive evidence. As we will see, the issues can be become quite complex due to the fact that there are different, competing views about the nature of ignorance and also about the nature of suspension. Moreover, there are importantly different kinds of epistemic norms. Our overall aim then will be to systematically chart how these different choices will impact the possible normative connections between ignorance and suspension.

À cheval entre l'essai littéraire et la réflexion philosophique, ce texte figure dans l'ouvrage "Ce que savoir veut dire" dirigé par le politologue Guillaume Lamy et paru chez Septentrion, en mars 2024. Il s'agissait d'y présenter "ce que savoir" a changé à nos vies.

"Quatrième de couverture: Qu'est-ce que savoir veut dire? Quels sont les effets des connaissances sur une vie? Pourquoi ont-elles tous ces pouvoirs leur permettant de bouleverser le sens d'une existence au point d'enclencher de véritables révolutions intérieures?

Philosophes, poètes, journalistes, spécialistes des ­sciences naturelles ou humaines, anthropologues, ­psycho­logues, ­linguiste, écrivains, romancières, médecin; plus de 25 témoins se prononcent sur les conséquences qu'amènent les ­connaissances lorsqu'elles emménagent dans une vie.
Avec des textes de Catherine Mavrikakis, Pierre Anctil, Annette Boudreau, Normand Baillargeon, Georges Leroux, Léa Clermont-Dion, Jonathan Lainey, Réjean Bergeron, Myriam Wojcik, Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert, Marianne Marquis-Gravel, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, Pierre Chastenay, Éric Bédard, Rachida Azdouz, Maïka Sondarjee, Mathieu Boisvert, Naïma Hamrouni, Mathieu Bélisle, Priscyll Anctil Avoine, Normand Mousseau, Martin Gibert, Vincent Laliberté, Frédéric Bouchard, Joseph Yvon Thériault et Andréanne Lebrun."

The third and final essay in the series on the emerging field of Cognition History (and Cognition Sociology). With a postscript to follow. This final essay discusses the concept of wilful ignorance, the existential crisis of the humanities, the anti-intellectualism thesis, and the popular outright rejection of sociology discipline. The essay ends with a call for solutions in revaluating digital humanities projects. A summary of Dr Buch’s conclusions of the Cognition Histories series is provided.

Most of us think that being unwittingly ignorant-as we are when we forget a friend's birthday or remain blind to glaring social injustices-is a bad thing. But if ignorance is really so bad, why aren't we required not to be ignorant? On the standard view that ignorance is the lack of knowledge, ignorance can be no more epistemically evaluable than absences. I develop a theory of ignorance that illuminates and resolves the major paradoxes that arise for the ethics and epistemology of ignorance. What kinds of epistemic shortcomings attach to ignorance? What obligations, if any, do we have not to be ignorant? This dissertation offers answers to those questions. Part I addresses the paradox of the evaluability of absences: absences are neither good nor bad, rational nor irrational. I first show that there exists an array of counterexamples to the common view that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, with sources in psychology, scientific theory, and everyday life where someone is ignorant because they fail to consider obvious and relevant possibilities. I then use these examples to argue for a substantive form of ignorance that is an attitude similar to belief. Many take it as evident that ignorant just is the state of not knowing. But I argue that this is incorrect: not knowing is neither necessary nor sufficient for some cases of ignorance. If epistemic evaluability is going to have any bearing, ignorance must be more than mere not knowing. Part II is the test case for ignorance's epistemic evaluability. I start by addressing a second paradox about ignorance and responsibility. If we follow the standard line that ignorance is the absence of knowledge, then ignorance isn't something that we can be responsible for. Some have confronted this paradox by suggesting that a theory of responsibility for ignorance (esp. ignorance of racial injustices) rests on our social obligations. On such a view, we are responsible for our ignorance just in case it harms others or further perpetuates social inequities. But such a theory suggests that we are only responsible because we have let down our communities since we owe it those around us not to be ignorant. I argue for a kind of substantive ignorance that takes an attitude form where agents are just as responsible for ignorance as they would be for belief. In the dissertation, I call this attitude ignoring to distinguish it from the common, passive form of ignorance. Ignoring, on my view, structures an inquiry so that we are responsible when we fail to consider obvious and relevant answers to an open inquiry. Importantly, the responsibility is agent-centered; it is not based on others, but on the idea that we owe it to ourselves to be as rational as possible. Part III applies my theory of ignorance to a problem in perception. Hallucinations, illusions, and attentional blindness are all forms of ignorance where perceivers 'miss out' on information in their

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.

Consider two eleventh grade students, Michael and Anna, who attend public high school in a suburban town. The high school has approximately 1,000 students and enforces an abstinence policy banning any discussion of sexual activity. Two years ago, Michael and Anna were the high school's first students to openly identify as gay and lesbian. Now over twenty students openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ). Recently, Michael and Anna discussed the growing interest among LGBTQ students and allies to form a gay-straight alliance (GSA) with one of their teachers. The teacher agreed to advise the GSA and filed a petition to the Board of Education to create the student group. The GSA's mission was to provide students with a safe space at school to discuss anti-LGBTQ harassment and work together to promote tolerance and acceptance regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. The Board of Education denied the GSA's petition, claiming that allowing a "sex-based" group to meet on school grounds would violate the school's abstinence policy and thus interfere with the school's educational mission. This hypothetical is not uncommon. LGBTQ youth are becoming more open about their sexual orientations and gender identities, which has resulted in more efforts by students to form student groups to discuss issues surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity, and in turn greater resistance to the formation of GSAs from school districts that oppose them. 1 LGBTQ students usually contend that GSA prohibitions violate their rights

While the science and values literature has seen recurrent concerns about wishful thinking, there have been few efforts to characterize this phenomenon. Based on a review of varieties of wishful thinking involved in climate skepticism, we argue that instances of wishful thinking can be fruitfully characterized in terms of the mechanisms that generate them and the problems associated with them. We highlight the array of mechanisms associated with wishful thinking, as well as the fact that it can be evaluated both from epistemic and ethical perspectives. We argue that it is doubtful that a single unified definition of wishful thinking can be developed. Moreover, the concept of wishful thinking can problematically focus excessive attention on individual and epistemic problems in science, to the exclusion of social and ethical problems.

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the "Complement Thesis". In this article, I discuss its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge.

I present two arguments that aim to establish logical limits on what we can know. More specifically, I argue for two results concerning what we can know about questions that we cannot answer. I also discuss a line of thought, found in the writings of Pierce and of Rescher, in support of the idea that we cannot identify specific scientific questions that will never be answered.

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination.

Don't take me half the way, Give me all of your love. (from a popular song) The male orgasm, says Donald Symons (1979: 86), 'for the most part is interesting only to people directly involved in one ... '. It occurs with 'monotonous regularity'. It does not distinguish the human male from other mammalian males. No mammalian species can in fact last for long without orgasmic males. What is evidently unusual for mammals is the orgasm of human females. Beach (1978: 148) goes so far as to say: '... the weight of available evidence favors the theory that female orgasm is a characteristic essentially restricted to our own species', though this may be an exaggeration in light of the evidence for female orgasm in some non-human primates (see Lancaster, 1979: 53-56, and Hrdy, 1981:166-172 for reviews). For example, Hrdy (1979: 312)suggests that female orgasm is 'plausible' in those species, such as Barbary macaques and chimpanzees, where an estrous female may solicit and bE mounted many times in close succession by a number of males. But such behavior has little to do with the conditions under which human females of today will achieve orgasm. Here, for example, is one of the main conclusions of a study of 100,000 readers of Redbook magazine: For most women, orgasm depends on being in love and feeling comfortable with their lovers. The Redbook women who had had premarital sex on a casual basis-once or a few times with several partners-were apparently not doing so for pure sexual pleasure, as they were the least likely to be reaching orgasm. The women who were most likely to be orgasmic in their premarital experience were having sex in a regular, stable relationship. Among the women who had had a series of one night stands, for example, fully 77 percent said they never reached orgasm, compared to 23 percent of the women who had sex frequently with their partners. What matters in premarital responsiveness is not the number of lovers, actually, but the number of times with each one. As it ever was in this society, the great majority of young women need a sustained sense of intimacy, security, and trust from a relationship before they shake off inhibitions and respond sexually (Tavris & Sadd, 1977: 53-4; also quoted by Symons, 1979: 219). This tendency for human female orgasm to occur in a context of trust and intimacy is also a finding of such major studies as Fisher (1973) (sample size: 285 women) and Hire (1976) (sample size: 1844 women). Certainly an orgy of successive mountings of an 'insatiable' (Sherfey, 1972) female by different males is not going to encourage any atmosphere of intimacy. Also, such behavior will hardly suggest that any of the males plan to stay around and help the females with raising offspring. At best the males would be confused about paternity, and natural selection would only prevent them from committing indiscriminate infanticide rather than foster pair bonding and associated paternal child care.

A prominent view in religious epistemology, which I call divine-help epistemology, says that people of faith are epistemically gifted by God, whereas non-believers are subject to the noetic effects of a fallen world. This view aims to show how religious beliefs for people of faith can be epistemically justified. But I argue that it makes such people prone to a cluster of epistemic vices that I call epistemic phariseeism. Divine-help epistemology is especially apt to promote these vices because its normativity is not just epistemic, but also religious and moral. I suggest an alternative epistemological view that is better suited to religious faith.

This paper offers an account of collective epistemic vices, which we call the “group identification account”. The group identification account attributes collective epistemic vices to the groups that are constituted by “group identification”, which is a primitive and non-doxastic self-understanding as a group member (Turner, 1982; Brewer, 1991; Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Pacherie, 2013; Salice & Miyazono, 2020). The distinctive feature of the group identification account is that it enables us to attribute epistemic vices not just to established social groups (e.g. committees, research teams, juries) but also to loose social groups (e.g. loosely connected people in an echo chamber) when they are constituted by group identification. The group identification account is contrasted with Fricker’s (2010, 2020) influential account, the “joint commitment account”, which focuses on established social groups, and has difficulty in making sense of collective epistemic vices of loose social groups...

Microaggression has been defined as "the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, and sexual orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group" (Sue, 2010, p. 229). Microaggression has been an underexplored construct in organizational psychology studies to date. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the microaggression literature and describe its characteristics, classifications and themes, and provide examples of conduct that constitute microaggressive behaviors. In doing so, we discuss what it is and what it is not, by exploring the conceptual overlap and distinction between microaggression and various other forms of negative acts such as aggression, bullying, incivility, social dominance theory, and social stigma and ostracism. We then posit that microaggression is likely present in many workplaces and how it may manifest. We describe the difficulty in correctly interpreting the intent or lack of intent of the perpetrator and consider the psychological dilemmas created by microaggression that contribute to the difficulty in discussing or addressing microaggression. We examine the impact of microaggression, and discuss the coping mechanisms used by targets and observers of microaggressive behaviors. Finally, we provide a discussion as to implications and recommendations for managers and work environments to create an organizational culture that reduces or mitigates the occurrence of microaggression in their organization.

he history that inspires this short book goes back a long way, and I have been thinking about that history, and how to incorporate it into a philosophical frame work, for a long time. Along the way I have incurred many debts, some of which I have certainly forgotten, and this list of acknowledgments is only partial. First of all, of course, to my family: my parents, Gladstone and Winnifred Mills, who brought me up to give equal respect to people of all races; my brother, Raymond Mills, and my cousin, Ward Mills, for consciousness-raising; my uncle and aunt, Don and Sonia Mills, for their role in Jamaica's own 1970S struggle against the legacy of the global Racial Contract. My wife, Elle Mills, has supported my work from the outset, sometimes having greater faith in me than I had in myself. Special friends, past and present, should also be cited: thanks to Bobs, for old times' sake; to Lois, a friend indeed, and a friend in deed; to Femi, fellow Third worlder, for numerous conversations since our days in grad school together about how philosophy in the academy could be made less academic. Horace Levy, my first philosophy teacher, and for many years the mobile one-person philosophy unit of the Mona campus of ix xii The Racial Contract When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us."-black American folk aphorism

Recent philosophical secondary literature on white ignorance – a concept most famously developed by the late philosopher Charles W. Mills – suggests that white ignorance is, one way or another, a non-structural phenomenon. I analyse two such readings, the agential view and the cognitivist view. I argue that they misinterpret Mills’ work by (among other things) committing a kind of structural erasure, and one which implies that Mills’ account cannot capture, for example, cases where white ignorance (and white racial domination) involves historical erasure, especially when perpetrated by sociopolitical institutions. This is particularly salient in cases such as the recent movement against anti-racist education, now widely conflated with critical race theory, in the United States and United Kingdom, which I offer as a brief case study.

Ableist microaggressions are subtle forms of discrimination that disabled people experience daily, perpetuating inequalities and maintaining their ongoing marginalization. Despite the importance of understanding such harms, little work has been done to examine how disabled people are discriminated against online. We address this gap by investigating how disabled people experience ableist microaggressions on social media and how they respond to and cope with these experiences. By conducting interviews with 20 participants with various disabilities, we uncover 12 archetypes of ableist microaggressions on social media, reveal participants' coping mechanisms, and describe the long-term impact on their wellbeing and social media use. Lastly, we present design recommendations, re-evaluating how social media platforms can mitigate and prevent these harmful experiences.

Malgré de bonnes intentions, certain.e.s chercheur.euse.s reproduisent des oppressions envers les groupes marginalisés dans leurs recherches. Cet article s’intéresse spécifiquement au développement de pratiques d’allié.e dans les recherches en travail social afin d’éviter la reconduction d’oppressions. Mobilisant les théories des injustices épistémiques comme cadre théorique, cet article suggère de fonder les pratiques d’allié.e sur le concept de proximité épistémique. Après une recension critique des écrits sur les concepts d’allié.e et de proximité, cet article offre une redéfinition du concept de proximité épistémique, développé en géographie et en économie, à la lumière des théories des injustices épistémiques. Il propose enfin quelques recommandations pour des pratiques d’allié.e.

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.

For over thirty years, microaggressions have been studied for their weight on members of groups like ethnic and racial minorities, women and members of the LGBTQ community. Microaggressions are the routine, derogatory interactions like slights gestures, snubs or minor insults. Microaggressions yield physical and psychological distress to victims and communicate to marginalized groups the biases and prejudices against them harbored by majority group members. My thesis study explored factors such as quality of psychical and psychological health, physical health symptoms, occurrence of physical pain, resilience, and self efficacy and relationships with racial, gender, and sexual orientation-based microaggressions. I analyzed these relationships in the context of perspectives of the bystander, victim, and perpetrator experience

Resumen: El volumen colectivo estudiado señala un cambio de tendencia en la filosofía analítica de las últimas décadas; un “giro político de la filosofía analítica”. Los editores recogen un nuevo interés en la filosofía analítica por identificar formas específicas de injusticia, así como modos de opresión que afectan a grupos desaventajados, sin abandonar las herramientas conceptuales de la tradición de pensamiento analítico. Aspira a ser una herramienta útil para el cambio social y político, contribuyendo a la erradicación de las formas de injusticia y opresión. Triunfa en revelar como impostergable la discusión sobre el papel que juegan los factores políticos y sociales en la filosofía en general.

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterious ignorance in the context of interdisciplinary research.