Ignorance by Rik Peels

Author:Rik Peels
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Degrees of Strategic Ignorance

Although the agnotology literature has focused on the phenomenon of making or keeping people ignorant, there is a closely related phenomenon that is equally agnogenetic: making people more ignorant. There are good reasons, from the perspective of the agents in agnogenetic practices, to make people more ignorant. The more ignorant they are, the more likely they are to act on that ignorance rather than on knowledge or true belief about the things in question. One could call this agnogenetic phenomenon deepening or strengthening people’s ignorance.

Again, to see how it works, we need to employ the epistemology of ignorance developed in the first part of this book. Rather than laboriously going through each of the ways in which ignorance comes in degrees for individuals and groups, let me present two ways in which one can deepen others’ ignorance: affecting which variety of ignorance an individual has and affecting which truths a group is ignorant of.

As I said, the tobacco industry first intentionally avoided speaking about the health effects of smoking. In that way, the industry kept people in a state of deep ignorance—they simply never considered the issue. From the perspective of the tobacco industry, this was the best variety of ignorance for people to be in: it did not lead to any difficult questions, and no money needed to be spent on it. As studies showing that smoking is harmful were published, however, this was no longer feasible; the tobacco companies had to choose a different variety of ignorance as their aim. From their perspective, disbelieving ignorance would be second-best, so they tried to come up with studies showing that smoking is not harmful. One could argue that people had become less ignorant, now that they were disbelievingly ignorant rather than deeply ignorant—after all, they had now at least considered the issue. However, from the perspective of the twofold Jamesian goal of believing the truth and not believing any falsehoods, people had become more ignorant: not only did they not believe the truth, but now they also believed a falsehood. As further evidence for the damaging effects of smoking was provided, though, the alternative studies became less and less credible. Yet, the tobacco industry could still aim at some variety of ignorance, albeit a variety on which people would be less ignorant, namely, suspending ignorance. They attempted to make the public suspendingly ignorant by disqualifying the researchers—saying they were biased or had been bribed—and disqualifying the studies—saying they applied to mice, not to human beings.

Another way in which degrees of ignorance matter to agnotology is that one can try to deepen people’s ignorance about something by making them ignorant about more things that have to do with it. Even if people come to know certain things about it, one can still aim to maintain people’s ignorance of other truths regarding that thing or topic. Take Donald Trump’s attempt to discredit Barack Obama and, thereby, to make people ignorant of Obama’s credentials and achievements. Trump added to that ignorance by casting doubt on Obama’s nationality.

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