The Epistemology and Semantics of Ignorance

This paper is concerned with ignorance. It develops a novel, full account of the nature and epistemic normativity of objectual and factual ignorance, degrees of ignorance, comparative ignorance, and the semantics of permissible outright attributions of ignorance of facts and phenomena. On this account, objectual ignorance of a phenomenon P is inversely proportional to fully comprehensive and maximally well‐connected knowledge of P: The closer an agent A approximates fully comprehensive and maximally well‐connected knowledge of P, the lower the degree of ignorance of A with regard to P. In turn, “A is ignorant with regard to a phenomenon P” is true in a context c just in case A approximates fully comprehensive and well‐connected knowledge of P distantly enough to surpass a threshold on degrees of objectual ignorance determined by c . Factual ignorance wh‐ of a fact F is directly proportional to the number of possible answers to the embedded wh‐ question that one must properly eliminate in order to have a complete answer to the embedded wh‐ question: The closer an agent A approximates a full answer to the embedded wh‐ question, the lower the degree of ignorance of A with regard to F. In turn, “A is ignorant wh‐ of a fact F” is true in context c if and only if A approximates a full answer to the embedded wh‐ question distantly enough to surpass a threshold of degrees of factual ignorance determined by c.