Do we even want to understand ignorance in these times? Does the ability to understand ignorance still matter when we are positively inundated with it from every direction? These are sincere questions that reasonable people may well have found themselves asking during the first Trump presidency when philosophy professor Daniel DeNicola’s systematic treatise on ignorance, Understanding Ignorance, was first published. Now that Americans are getting ready to do it all again with the returning Trump administration while watching the concurrent rise of xenophobic authoritarianism across the globe, it’s understandable to feel burned out on ignorance: tired of hearing it expressed, tired of seeing it in action, tired of trying to stem its seemingly irrepressible tide.
However, that exhausted feeling is precisely why DeNicola’s Understanding Ignorance remains a necessary reading seven years later. Ignorance is not going away, so to stay ignorant about ignorance this time around is to cede the race at the starting block. Now that we have had time to absorb the reams of paper and pools of ink that have been spilled in service of the question 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton starkly posed in her post-election memoir, What Happened?, DeNicola’s work offers an opportunity to step back from the particular political exigencies of American ignorance and tackle the problem from the root. What is ignorance, where does it come from, and how does it place ethical claims on us as members of what DeNicola calls an “epistemic community”—a “network of interactive, cognizing communicators?”
Understanding Ignorance is split into five sections: an introduction and four sections based respectively on a commonplace metaphor for ignorance: ignorance as place, ignorance as a boundary, ignorance as the limit, and ignorance as the horizon. Rather than offering a single definition that holds static across the entirety of the text, DeNicola offers an array of possibilities through which we might understand what ignorance is and how it functions. Significantly, there are key sections in which he addresses “public ignorance”—“widespread, reprehensible ignorance of matters that are significant for our lives together”—but the book’s focus on the many facets of ignorance allows its author to move beyond questions of amelioration into questions of value, exploring the reasons why certain varieties of ignorance actually provide us with bases for moral and ethical behavior.
In the “ignorance as place” section, DeNicola considers ignorance’s historical and mythological presence in well-known examples like Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden. In Plato’s Cave, a group of people are trapped in a subterranean chamber, seeing only the shadows that mysterious figures project on the wall before them. Escaping from the cave of ignorance into the light of genuine knowledge and experience becomes the philosopher’s task. In DeNicola’s reading, the biblical Garden of Eden, where ignorance of Good and Evil kept the first humans in a state of perfection, stands in opposition to the Cave as a place where the removal of ignorance also necessitates the loss of innocence. By raising the question of whether or not the state of ignorance can reasonably be theorized as one that we leave behind as we mature, he also broaches the moral valences of ignorance. “Living morally,” he concludes, “requires more of us than innocence; it may require that we shed our moral simplicity…Moral maturity requires taking on the risks of agency.”
When describing “ignorance as boundary” in part three, DeNicola raises the possibility that ignorance is something that can be mapped, leading to the moment in which Understanding Ignorance tackles public ignorance most directly: if “the borderlands between knowledge and ignorance” are “dynamic places”, how can it be the case that these borders so frequently shift away from the reasonably knowable things that we need to share to build a justly functioning democratic social system? On the one hand, he points out that the exponential degree of knowledge available to the average person counterintuitively increases our ignorance because the existence of more things that we could know necessarily increases the number of things we do not know. The deluge of information leads to truncated knowledge experiences, like the pervasive articles that promise to give readers “the five things [they] need to know about X.”
On the other hand, it is also nearly impossible to “secure a consensus on what content basic public knowledge must include,” especially with the decline of liberal arts educational programs that are, in theory, designed to promote this consensus. The multifaceted problem of public ignorance, in other words, is much larger than anything as simplistic as so-called stupidity, driven by many technological and educational factors that may not lend themselves to a unilateral solution. In this section, DeNicola also considers several other ethical and value-based assessments of ignorance, explaining how “some virtues, like intellectual humility, discretion, and trust, are possible only in relation to ignorance.” This is not the last time that he will offer the possibility that, just like knowledge, ignorance can partake in both vices and virtues.
In the fourth section of Understanding Ignorance, DeNicola distinguishes between a boundary and a limit: “But when something has a limit, there is no intimation of what lies beyond except as negativity.” Our knowledge has boundaries—there are things that we could know but don’t—but questions about the absolute limits of our knowledge, the points that we cannot move past, are more existentially vexed. Here, his preoccupation with what he calls “unknown unknowns” takes its most definite shape, drawing on examples like “a number that no one has ever named or specified” or “a person whom no one now remembers.”
These concepts beyond the limits of knowability are ripe for theoretical exploration but may seem more like philosophical puzzles than immediate matters of common concern. However, the concept of an “unknown unknown” raises the famous adage that “you can’t prove a negative”, leading to a meaningful rumination on the thorny problems that rest in the argument from ignorance, which “frequently issues from one who is committed to a belief as irrefutable, immune from evidence”, like a conspiracy theorist or a willfully ignorant politician making spurious claims about autism and vaccines. (Speaking of immunity!)
Lastly, DeNicola considers the ambitious possibilities held within the idea of “ignorance as horizon,”, which is “always with us and yet always out of reach”. The horizon of the things we know and don’t know invites us to explore, even as we recognize that it moves away from us as we move nearer to it. Here, he argues in favor of the positive things that ignorance can contribute to our lives and societies without disregarding how it can be destructive. Specifically, he points out how “imagination and creativity are ventures into the unknown…inimical to the repetition of facts, the regurgitation of knowledge.”
Taking the example of improvisational jazz, he considers that a world without ignorance would also be a world without discovery—and what an impoverished world that would be, despite ignorance’s many dangers. In this way, DeNicola offers an argument for the value of ignorance similar to the one offered about the value of death by Martin Hägglund (in 2019’s This Life) and others: it may have devastating consequences and produce great suffering, but without it, life—and knowledge—cease to be meaningful.
The author knows that he is writing a book on an academic topic, published by an academic press, that is nevertheless likely to have appeal outside the small and shrinking circle of jargon-filled academic discourse since ignorance is so clearly a matter of broad public concern. Therefore, he wisely decides to reserve his densest analyses for an epilogue at the end of Understanding Ignorance. Readers who are professionally invested in the long tradition of analytic epistemology will surely find the discussions of “bivalency and scalar gradience” in the epilogue to be fascinating provocations in their discipline, but this section does not seem to be written with a wider audience in mind—which is every bit DeNicola’s right as an author and a scholar, but it does raise the question of whether or not this concluding portion would have been better served by publication in an academic journal for specialists. Also, while the philosopher’s propensity for giving equal argumentative weight to every element of his topic is endearing, readers may find that certain sections—the section about the kind of ignorance involved in predicting the weather, for example—bear less argumentative heft than others.
Ultimately, Understanding Ignorance is quite successful in the goal that its title lays out, even if the possibility of knowing about ignorance feels counterintuitive at first. In one of the book’s most memorable images, DeNicola compares his project to “shin[ing] a spotlight on my shadow in order to see it better.” However, the rest of the text makes a convincing case that this is, indeed, merely a “superficial paradox”; ignorance is meaningful, and knowing more about what it is will help readers counteract its more deleterious effects while appreciating its surprising place in virtues like curiosity, intellectual humility, and discretion.
Specialists in analytic philosophy will need to provide their own evaluation of the work as a contribution to a niche academic field. Still, a more general audience is likely to leave this book feeling, if not encouraged, at least more informed about what ignorance is, how it develops, and its place in our systems of moral and ethical judgment. We may still have a long road ahead of us, but with this Understanding Ignorance in hand, we’ll be able to respond to public ignorance articulately, like we know what we are talking about.