One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call’d,
Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd’n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord
Envie them that? can it be sin to know,
Can it be death? and do they onely stand
By Ignorance, is that thir happie state,
The proof of thir obedience and thir faith?
—John Milton
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
—Robert G. Ingersoll
There is a radically different image of the place of ignorance: a vision of bliss. Were we to deconstruct the various portrayals of such a place, we would reveal two claims about values. The first is that dwelling in this place is good, even the epitome of goodness. The second is that seeking knowledge, perhaps in certain realms, perhaps knowledge about this place, is bad. Knowing things is irreparably destructive of this good place. Learning involves a loss of something precious; it spoils everything. To come to know is to fall from grace.
Whether it signifies our natal state as infants or a golden age of our human past, this image of fortunate ignorance functions as an ideal. But on any interpretation, you and I have already departed that place. And whatever the significance of that loss, it has distanced us from that abode and enabled us to comprehend what was lost. Not exactly outsiders, more like reflective exiles, we may now see that place in perspective and come to understand it as none who dwell there can.
In the account in Genesis, the Lord God, having created the heavens and the earth “in all their vast array,” planted a garden in Eden, and in that beautiful and bounteous setting crafted his crowning achievements: man and woman. These creatures, images of God himself, were commissioned to tend and enjoy the garden and to live off its bounty. They were innocent and “felt no shame.” To preserve this bliss, they were ordered not to eat the fruit of a special tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge was forbidden to them; should they eat that fruit or even touch that tree, warned God, “you will surely die.” And so they remained, in obedience and ignorance … until, of course, the cunning serpent appeared and said flatly that God had lied: “You will not surely die.” And God’s motives were not noble: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The moment between the serpent’s tempting insinuation and Eve’s biting into the fruit is certainly one of the most suspenseful in all literature; the destiny of humanity hangs in the balance. Her hesitation is brief but reflective. She notices the fruit is “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for wisdom.” She eats it and shares it with Adam. That simple act changes everything.
At once, “the eyes of both of them were opened,” with the sudden insight they acquired. They also acquired a sense of shame about their nakedness. The couple seems to dodge responsibility when caught by God, who frames his question, significantly, as a question of place: “Where are you?” Emerging from hiding, Adam reveals that he is ashamed; when challenged, he shifts the blame to Eve, who shifts the blame to the serpent. Their sinful defiance provokes God to curse first the snake, then the woman, and then the man. Wearing clothes God grudgingly makes for them, the couple are banished from paradise and exiled into lives of pain, labor, and death. God is not only angry and dismayed at their disobedience, he is also wary that they will go further: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” As a precaution, he places “cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”1
This familiar story is, of course, the Fall of Man, the Original Sin, Paradise Lost, and the subject of centuries of high art, majestic literature, elaborated theology, and sermonic rebuke. It links our native state—whether we think of the infancy of individuals or the origin of humanity (ontogeny mirrors phylogeny in such myths)—with innocence and grace. The moral seems clear: blissful innocence is despoiled by curiosity, especially regarding forbidden knowledge. Spiritual grace involves obedience and not-knowing, but it is lost forever in disgrace as a result of the typically human folly of epistemic defiance and the devastating knowledge it secures.
Like all great myths, however, this one inspires dilation and continual reappraisal. The devout interpretation is that this account portrays how sin brought pain and death into the world. There is so much to notice, however, and its richness may suggest quite different interpretations, especially since there are intriguing puzzles in the story. What might we notice?
A number of details suggest an alternative interpretation, one that is provocatively revisionist. In the first place, the serpent was right: they did not die that day or for a very long time thereafter (930 years later for Adam, according to Genesis). If that’s correct, God was deceptive at best. Adam and Eve did not die as a result of their disobedience, for even in their blissful state, they were mortal all along. Remember, it was the chance they might gain immortality that prompted God to secure the tree of life. They may have become aware of their mortality as a result of their newfound knowledge, but that is a different matter. Moreover, in this (for some, blasphemous) version, their transition can be seen as their maturation and humanization, and the story as a parable that marks the rise of self-consciousness, autonomy, and responsibility—in which case, the eating of the forbidden fruit is an act of self-liberation, a defiant laying of claim for knowing over ignorance. One can, in short, read this story as one of those myths in which heroes defy the gods to purchase their full humanity.
Moreover, God is worried that his creatures will seek to become gods themselves. There seem to be only two steps between humanity and divinity: knowledge of good and evil, and immortality. The serpent also had claimed God’s motive for dissembling was a fear that “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”—which is consistent with God’s own expressed worry that the couple had taken the first step: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” (I ignore the seeming hint of polytheism as well as God’s momentary disregard for the woman’s newfound awareness.)2 Now, it seems that only one step remains for godhood, and it must be denied them: eternal life. God’s motives seem more exclusionary than benign.
No doubt, one should be wary of taking ancient creation stories literally or creating fictions of coherence. But what is at stake here is the larger meaning of the story. And this shift away from the devout interpretation seems to pivot less on the question of the couple’s motives for their disobedience, and more on the question of God’s motives and his goodness—their Lord’s “envie,” in Milton’s term.3 Why would the Lord God fashion such creatures and put them together—inquisitive humans, clever serpent, and tempting fruit—simply as a test? Why are the prospects of the couple’s godhood, and even just their knowledge of good and evil, so worrisome? Was the Fall also a Liberation? However these theologically awkward questions are answered,4 the response is likely to include this point: the prelapsarian state should be understood primarily as one of innocence rather than one of ignorance.
What is the difference? To craft an answer, I want first to compare the two storied places—the Cave and the Garden—as places of ignorance. We will then be in a better position to unpack the concept of innocence and its relation to ignorance.
As a setting, the two places seem quite different: contrast the restraints and claustrophobic barrenness of the dim Cave with the beautiful bounty and dappled sunshine of the wondrous Garden. The Cave is a horrible abode, and, once accustomed to the light, any liberated soul would dread a return. The Garden is a paradise to which any expelled soul would long to return. Nonetheless, there are deep similarities.
Both the Cave and the Garden are presented as native states, the place or circumstance of their inhabitants since their birth (or creation); they originate there. Both places are self-contained and reclusive; there is no breeze from the world outside. Both sets of inhabitants are ignorant of crucial matters. They do not really understand their situation and cannot assess their circumstances: they do not know that they do not know.5 Both places are places of confinement, enforced by others of greater knowledge and power upon whom they are dependent. They have tasks to busy themselves (Adam and Eve to tend the garden, and the troglodytes to note the passing shadows). Both parties are kept and cared for, though their experience and setting are quite different.
In both myths, the inhabitants are removed from these places and radically transformed as a result; in both cases, the departure is initiated by other agents—the mysterious “someone” who releases a prisoner’s chain, and the subtle serpent. The freed prisoner and the banished couple gain understanding (the symbolic “contemplation of the sun as it is” and “knowing good and evil”). They all have their eyes opened; and they look back, regard and assess the irreversible transformation from a new perspective in a world grown much larger. They can finally understand where they were and what they were. They see themselves and the world in a new way. And they have acquired new tasks, new responsibilities that reflect their new stature: Plato’s enlightened soul must return and attempt to free others—though he can never go back to what he was; Adam and Eve can never return and must labor for their sustenance all their days.
These parallels notwithstanding, the two places are iconic of the bad and the good. What these comparisons miss, one might say (setting aside the theological framework), is the grace and innocence that pervades the Garden of Eden, and the moral coloration that is absent from Plato’s Cave. The Garden is a moral ideal, lush with vitality, and home to creatures who are made in God’s image; the Cave is a horror, occupied by the living dead. While pain is involved in both transitions, the pain for the prisoner is in the process of learning and the prospect of return; the pain for Adam and Eve is in the irreversible consequences of disgrace. The liberated prisoner experiences the joy of knowing the Good; the fallen couple has the shame and the regret of losing the good, the blessedness of what once was and can be no longer. One has risen from ignorance to enlightenment; the others have fallen from innocence to depravity.
What differentiates the ignorance of the Cave from that of the Garden is the innocence ascribed to Adam and Eve. It is the moral tone of that innocence (which derives from its divine ordination) that renders their ignorance blissful. To pursue this thought further, let us look more closely at the concept of innocence.
We begin our lives in innocence as well as in ignorance. Infants and children are called “the Innocents,” a morally pastel term that suggests a sweet combination of blamelessness and harmlessness. Etymologically, innocence from the Latin in + nocere (not + to hurt or to injure) is a twin to the term innocuous. But even in Latin, the term innocentia quickly added “blamelessness” to the fundamental meaning of “harmlessness.” The blameless aspect of innocence is explicated as freedom from guilt, sin, or moral wrong (either in general or in regard to a specific matter); to be innocent in this way is to be untainted by evil. Call this facet of innocence the strand of moral purity. The harmlessness of innocence refers to the absence of cunning, artifice, or guile; to be innocent in this way is to possess an artless honesty and simple wholeheartedness. This is the strand of moral simplicity. Taken together, these strands suggest a third: moral vulnerability. The innocent are easily harmed. Innocence is every bit as fragile as ignorance: touch it and its bloom is gone.
These thoughts generate a flurry of questions: What is the relationship between innocence and ignorance? Does “innocence” merely name a way of dwelling in ignorance? Are Plato’s Cave dwellers “innocents”? Can innocence be constructed or deliberately maintained, by others or oneself? Is innocence a precious thing to be protected and preserved, a state of grace; or does it carry dangers, moral liabilities? Might we be “blamed for our blamelessness”?
The moral purity aspect of innocence suggests that its opposite is guilt or sinfulness. Taken alone, that seems unrelated to ignorance. The OED, in defining this sense of the term, however, includes the phrase, “the state of being untainted with or unacquainted with evil,”6 which implies a lack of experience of evil, a lack of knowing evil (what I called being unacquainted with or not knowing what it is like in chapter 2). It might more remotely suggest a lack of knowledge of evil as well (not knowing that). Moral purity may involve more than inexperience and ignorance, but it seems tied to both. It is this connotation that led medieval moralists to use innocence as a synonym for chastity.
We normally find moral purity to be a precious quality when it is a natural quality, as in the biblical tradition that affirms it to have been our primal, paradisiacal condition. That does not mean that its possessor deserves praise. A child does not deserve praise for being “unacquainted with evil,” however precious that condition may be, because one’s innocence is not an accomplishment for which one is responsible. But protecting such innocence seems morally justified and probably obligatory. It falls to certain others who are not innocent to protect the innocence of those who are.
Yet when innocence is prolonged and enforced, moral maturity is kept out of reach. The restriction of experience, the prohibitions and censorship of knowledge that such sustained naiveté would likely require, become a kind of imposed ignorance. The Garden becomes more like the Cave. In normal developmental conditions of freedom, growth, and socialization, we gain experience, we learn and are affected (tainted, if you insist) by what we come to know. But only through such passage do we achieve maturity. An ingénue may be fresh, pure, and ingenuous, as the term indicates; but she has not crossed the threshold of moral maturity. When Adam and Eve lost their archetypal innocence in the knowledge of good and evil, they passed from shamelessness to having a sense of shame. They gained self-awareness, a sense of the possibilities of freedom and the risks of error, the forbidden knowledge of right and wrong, and a foreboding of their mortality—in short, they became full-fledged moral persons, capable of moral maturity and agency.7
Similarly, we might take delight in moral simplicity: the open-pored, wholehearted responsiveness of a child. After all, a lack of sophistication and cunning might well be refreshing, even cherished, in a decadent world of deception, guile, and cynicism. But there are cautions here as well. In defining this “guilelessness” sense of the term “innocence,” the OED adds: “hence want of knowledge or sense, ignorance, silliness.”8 With this nuance, the innocent seem not only to lack a cunning or guileful way of applying knowledge in action,9 but perhaps also to lack knowledge or good sense at all—to be clueless. In other words, there is a real concern that moral simplicity will morph either into insensitivity and obtuseness, or into silliness. The innocence of children is perilously close to brutishness (a relationship portrayed with horrifying effect in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies); and feckless simplicity renders one a simpleton. Having a singular will, wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, and acting from uncomplicated motives, are beautiful if sometimes bracing qualities in the young; but they are connected to seeing the world simply, thinking in primary colors, or perhaps judging things only in black and white. In the more experienced person, they are stultifying. They may reflect emotional insensitivity, a dullness of perception or intellect, an obtuseness. As Martha Nussbaum has written, “Obtuseness is a moral failing.”10 Failure to notice particulars is a special form of ignorance, a blindness to subtle but salient information. If moral judgment requires sensitivity to nuance and detail, a high-resolution perception of particulars, an understanding of subtleties, then such obtuseness or ignorance impedes the moral life. Living morally requires more of us than innocence; it may require that we shed our moral simplicity.
The third strand—moral vulnerability—alerts us to the risks involved in innocence. The innocent are susceptible to exploitation, betrayal, and defilement. A corollary of moral vulnerability is that innocence requires protection by a guardian. It is, in that way, a state of moral dependence. Thus, a place of innocence is a place of perpetual dependence. Moreover, it is an uncomprehended dependence, because the innocent, by definition, do not understand what they are being protected from. They may confuse protection with imprisonment. As with the attribution of ignorance, the attribution of innocence in this primal sense can be delivered only from an outside and privileged perspective. Only the noninnocent (the no-longer-innocent, if you prefer) are in a position to ascribe, understand, and protect another’s innocence.
How are we to mark the difference between “protecting” and “prolonging” innocence? The story of Adam and Eve implies a sudden transition, an immediate eye-opening recognition that is triggered by a single rebellious act. It is true that innocence can be lost or taken in that way, by dramatic acts that defile or disillusion or reveal, despite the most alert efforts to protect. But the loss of innocence is for most a more gradual process, coinciding with human development and normal encounters with a wider world. Prolonging innocence involves the retarding of such development and the restriction of otherwise normal encounters. It is a paternalistic infantilization that anticipates perpetual dependence and ignorance, not a preparation for independence and awareness.
To sum up: the moral purity, simplicity, and vulnerability of innocence entail an immature moral goodness and a lack of awareness, experience, and knowledge. To be innocent is indeed to dwell in ignorance, especially of moral matters (and by extension, to other worldly matters). One can certainly be ignorant without being innocent, but the reverse is not possible. Innocence has liabilities: purity prolonged may become immaturity; simplicity may slide into obtuseness or silliness; vulnerability requires dependency. Attempting to sustain innocence beyond its natural span imposes a distorting ignorance—a Peter Pan flight from the responsibilities of awareness and agency. Innocence prolonged is artificial, a constructed condition of ignorance maintained by those who are more experienced. Dwelling in protected or prolonged innocence, taken in context, cannot therefore be wholly innocent. The place of innocence is not really an innocent place at all.
Might one act purposefully to protect one’s own innocence? Would it not be virtuous to shield oneself intentionally from mental corruption, degradation, and vice? Suppose Marlene wants to prevent troubling images from entering her consciousness and so seeks to avoid images that are horrific, pornographic, and disgusting. To that end, she shuns many films and newscasts. And Juan, who wants to evade all moral fault and “dirty hands,” habitually rejects positions of responsibility and action. These actions are autonomous, rationally proactive, and not imposed by others. In all such cases, however, the desire for innocence feeds an area of ignorance. And both Marlene and Juan are calculating in their attempt to secure a compartmentalized innocence; their innocence is not thorough. But is their motive laudable: is it morally good or acceptable to dwell in innocence?
I believe the answer is: it depends. One can remove the wretchedness of the world from sight and mind for short periods—it is difficult to live a rich life without doing that on occasion—or reject an area of knowledge or type of experience. But yearning to dwell in innocence throughout one’s life is morally hazardous, as is shielding oneself from troubling but significant aspects of one’s lifeworld. To attempt to secure one’s virtues by avoiding any situation that would test or exercise them is moral evasion, a vice. To act always with the primary concern of protecting one’s virtues is not virtuous. Moral maturity requires taking on the risks of agency.
This analysis, though it acknowledges the preciousness of “natural” (not artificially prolonged) innocence, presumes that awareness, experience, and knowledge are good things. Yet it seems we value innocence, at least in part, because we fear the corruption that learning of the world will bring. Is there some knowledge it is better not to possess? Is not ignorance, if not bliss, at least sometimes preferable? As John Milton queried, “Can it be sin to know, /Can it be death?”11
Approaching these questions is easier when we think in terms of experience (knowing what it is like) rather than propositional knowledge (knowing that). Certainly there are terrible experiences—intense suffering, horrifying sights, humiliations, unendurable losses—that anyone would prefer not to have, no matter what insight or benefit might result. Not all experiences are to be desired or welcomed, despite occasional Faustian urgings or Nietzschean dithyrambic passions. Enduring, surviving, even triumphing over may bring beatific transformations; but that does not always make having the experiences preferable to avoiding them. Being alert to particulars may be an important quality, but certain particulars may provoke disgust or horror, not edification; and others, such as heeding my neighbor’s dog barking, may merely be annoying, not illuminating. Control, selectivity, and the intrinsic value of experiences count for something.
When we think about these questions in terms of knowing that, they become more difficult to answer. Certainly I may come to know things I wish I didn’t—though often this simply means that I wish the truth were different, not that I wish I didn’t know the truth. But it is concern with the knowing itself that is at issue, and it is the case that knowing some things can be psychologically damaging, causing shock, chagrin, disillusionment, envy, rage, or other negative emotions. A barrage of such knowledge can make one jaded and world-weary. Sometimes, knowing can be dangerous—as is made vivid in the need for witness protection, for example. Not just bits of information, but whole domains of knowledge are considered unsafe, and so prohibited; some are deemed sinful and so are forbidden. All these judgments have provided the standard justification for prolonging innocence and for imposing ignorance.
Places and types of ignorance may be constructed intentionally. It matters whether this construction is self-commissioned or erected by one party for imposition on another. In the latter case, it also matters how this imposition of ignorance is carried out: does it involve concealment, deception, disinformation, or mutual agreement? The asymmetry of privilege and power that is embedded in the relationship of the knower to the ignorant also applies to the relation of the guardian to the innocent: cognoscenti over ignoscenti, the judge over the judged, expert over layperson, master over novice, the informed over the uninformed, the one who knows over those in the dark who have not a clue. That power may be purely self-absorbed, relishing superiority over the ignorant; it may be self-interested, alert to exploiting the advantages of the epistemic inequality; or it may be paternalistic, expressed through the benevolent intent to save the ignorant or innocent from harmful experiences or knowledge.
In any case, however benign the original intent, the effect is to create and maintain secrets and lies, censored learning, dire taboos, esoterica, “the classified universe” of government documents, and places of ignorance. The same is true with places of prolonged innocence. Because of the differential in power, they easily become places of dependence and oppression. Ignorance, like innocence, has a strand of vulnerability, especially with regard to the watchful ones who know.12
In chapter 2, I noted that first-, second-, and third-person ascriptions of ignorance function differently: whose ignorance one asserts matters epistemically. Adding metalevel discourse—first- and second-order claims—produces a dizzying, mix-and-match array of epistemic possibilities. Just to cite random examples of these metacognitive claims: there are things I know you know, and things I know you don’t know; there are things you don’t know I know; things we know that others don’t know we know; there are things others know that we don’t know that they know; and so on. Such different forms have correspondingly different epistemic warrants and implications.
These are not mere logical possibilities conjured as pedantic niceties. There are practical contexts in which it is crucial, for example, for us both to know X and for us each to know that the other knows X—and to know that we share that knowledge. Many common transactions, such as paying something by check, depend on such shared or communal knowledge. The game of poker, on the other hand, relies on the players’ shared knowledge of their shared ignorance: players need to know that no one at the table knows the cards being held by others or the next card to be drawn, and need to know that all other players are aware of that fact. When the recently enlightened prisoner returned to the Cave, he knew the others did not know things that he knew—indeed they might have killed him, had he pressed his point to tell them.
These tortuous shifts in perspectives and metalevels remind us that we are not solo knowers; we are members of an epistemic community. An epistemic community is a network of interactive, cognizing communicators; that is, of individuals who may seek, possess, forget, communicate, share, and conceal or protect information, knowledge, and ignorance. To do these things, they must either share a language or develop reliable translation processes. Their activities, though interactive, may be pursued individually or cooperatively. More formal communities have shared procedures for inquiry, standards for warranting beliefs, and domains of confidentiality. Such a community contains many epistemic roles, including: learner, instructor, researcher, discoverer, witness, testifier, expert, judge, critic, confidante, liar, whistle-blower, and so on.13
Epistemic communities overlap and nest within each other, and all of us are active in many, from the largest and most general to small and narrowly specialized ones. Science constitutes such a community, as do families, neighborhoods, belief-based religious groups, professions, corporations, legislative bodies, individual professionals and their clients/customers, academic disciplines, and so many others. Those engaged in a game of poker form a short-lived community.
Interestingly, the prisoners in Plato’s Cave also comprise an epistemic community, not because they are in the same circumstance, but because they share a common language in which they name things (the shadows) and possess beliefs about them; they make predictions, hold competitions, and honor those who are cognitively adept. And they would be hostile to any outsider who challenges the framework of their shared beliefs. We can, however, delineate a larger community that includes both the prisoners and their “keepers” who tend the fire and carry objects; or even larger ones that include the unnamed liberator, Plato, and readers of Plato. The Garden of Eden is also such a community, including Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the Lord God. (Or again, we could expand the focus to include even biblical scholars and readers.)
But unlike those in progressive epistemic communities, the cave dwellers and the first humans seem to have no awareness of the possibility of meta-ignorance. Unknown unknowns drive the narrative of both myths, because they are so significant, and because they are known knowns to us readers. But no matter how encompassing the epistemic community—even to include all those who can know—we are all haunted by unknown unknowns.
Imagined places of ignorance have long been used to stimulate thought and test ideas—from quite simple scenarios, such as the proverbial “fork in the road” at which one must make a fateful choice without knowing where either path leads; to stories about the advantages of imposing ignorance, such as Plato’s tale of the Ring of Gyges,14 which questions the effect on behavior of possessing a ring that makes one invisible to others at will; to more elaborated situations of ignorance like the Cave and the Garden of Eden. Especially in recent years, philosophers have developed purpose-designed places of ignorance as thought experiments: settings contrived so as to support an argument or explore a problem through the interplay of what is known and not known. We might think of these as fanciful vignettes of ignorance drawn within an implied epistemic community.
The most widely known of such places, like the Cave, involves prisoners—specifically, interrogation rooms in which two prisoners are each offered a deal. Developed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation in 1950 (and later formalized by Albert W. Tucker), the “prisoner’s dilemma” has become a stock example in decision theory, generating innumerable variations and elaborations. The situation is familiar to anyone who watches crime shows: it portrays the prosecutorial strategy of divide-and-conquer. I offer a brief version:
Police arrest two partners in crime. They separate the prisoners and offer each a deal: Confess and testify against your partner, and you will receive immunity (no jail time) and he will get five years in jail. Know that your partner is getting the same deal—and if you both confess, you will each receive a three-year prison sentence. If neither of you confesses, you will each get one year in jail. Each prisoner must choose either to confess and betray or remain silent. They are ignorant of the each other’s decision, yet the best choice depends on what the other will decide. What should they do?
In this form, the self-interested and rational prisoner will choose betrayal, other things being equal. That is why it is a good game for prosecutors. Yet mutual silence would result in the lower total years in prison. Varying the conditions and sentences may generate different lines of reasoning, but the basic structure of this place is clear: the best decision for oneself depends on someone else’s decision, but both are made simultaneously and without knowledge or coordination. The predicament is a stark example of what the German social theorist Niklas Luhmann called situations of “double contingency.”15
In his magisterial treatise, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls created a place of ignorance that is structured with exquisite care. He called this place “the Original Position.”16 We are asked to imagine individuals who are to formulate the social contract. More specifically, they are to choose the principles that will govern the basic institutions of the society in which they will live. These are rational individuals, not given to gambling with important matters, and though they are self-interested, there is a catch: they must do their choosing behind “a veil of ignorance.” It is as though they have severe amnesia: they do not know their own identity; and, although they know that they do have interests and value certain things, they do not know what those are. They undoubtedly have talents and liabilities, gender and an age, genetic propensities, a position in the social scale—all the particulars of a human life—but the individuals are ignorant of what they are. Rawls uses such ignorance to construct a situation of fairness, and he deems as just whatever principles would be chosen in such a situation.
Those two imagined places exemplify effects of ignorance on decision making. But other thought experiments are designed to address different issues. Take, for example, “the Chinese Room,” devised by John Searle:
Imagine that someone who understands no Chinese is locked in a room with a lot of Chinese symbols and a computer program for answering questions in Chinese. The input consists in Chinese symbols in the form of questions; the output of the system consists in Chinese symbols in answer to the questions. We might suppose that the program is so good that the answers to the questions are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. But all the same, neither the person inside nor any other part of the system literally understands Chinese.17
Searle’s interest in this place is analogical: he uses it to deny the possibility of “strong artificial intelligence,” concluding that no computer program, however sophisticated in functional output, creates thought or understanding. Though the messages flow in and out of the Chinese Room in a smoothly functional way, the intelligence is simulated and conceals a particular form of ignorance, a lack of understanding.
Introduced by Frank Jackson, the imagined place known as “Mary’s Room” also involves a specific form of ignorance.18 Mary has been forced to live in a black-and-white room and to learn about the world through a black-and-white monitor. Never has she seen a color (except black or white). Despite these constraints, she has become a brilliant scientist, studying the neurophysiology of vision. She acquires all the information about the physical processes involved when we see objects like ripe tomatoes, or use color terms like red and blue. She can specify which wavelength combinations from sunlight stimulate our retinas, and she understands how this affects our nervous system; she even knows the neural connections that lead to the physiological changes when we utter the sentence, “The sky is blue.” What will happen, Jackson asks, when Mary is released from the room? If she encounters a red rose, would she learn anything new? Jackson intended this thought experiment to argue that Mary would learn something, that seeing a shade of red or tasting a pineapple (mental phenomena called qualia) constitutes a genuine form of knowledge, and that therefore the world is not reducible to the physical. Mary’s situation portrays an interesting form of being unacquainted with. Jackson would argue that Mary in her room lacks understanding because she lacks experience; she lacks knowing what it is like actually to see red, despite her brilliance and sophisticated knowledge.19 The existence of qualia is vigorously debated in philosophy; it is also contested just what, if anything, Mary would gain from this experience. But in sensory deprivation and the later immediacy of her experience we find an echo of Plato’s Cave as a place of ignorance.
Yet another example is a place first imagined by John Locke and later elaborated by Harry Frankfurt.20 A person sits in a room with two doors, A and B. He considers which one to use, but is unaware that A is locked. As it happens, he chooses B and therefore remains ignorant of the fact that, had he chosen A, he couldn’t have opened it. Frankfurt argues that the person is responsible for the choice he made even though he, in fact, had no other possibility. Frankfurt’s ultimate purpose is to separate the ascription of voluntary, responsible choice from the existence of alternate possibilities—thus permitting us to hold people accountable even in a deterministic world.
I offer these necessarily truncated distillations of philosophical thought experiments as a sampler of constructed places of ignorance. Each has given rise to robust debate and a responsive literature. But though these samples by no means exhaust the genre, their recital shows how illuminating it can be to examine a structured interplay of what is known and what is not. We are provoked by these epistemic thought experiments, imposing ignorance on our imaginary subjects, observing that place from our privileged perspective, and drawing on our metalevel knowledge to interpret what we learn and display.
Numerous cognitive psychologists and experimental economists have designed research projects in which ignorance is imposed on real human subjects. I am not referring to “double-blind” research or “hidden purpose” experiments—though they too are research techniques that impose ignorance. What I mean is research on human decision making under conditions of uncertainty or ignorance. Typically, subjects are asked to make a decision based on information that is inadequate, conflicting, or ambiguous, so researchers may observe the resultant reasoning, response, or behavior. Usually, these experiments are conducted to reveal our cognitive biases, the ways in which—deprived of adequate information—we tilt our judgments. As this research accumulates, we are learning how we behave in situations of structured ignorance.
In part 2, we have explored ignorance as a place within which one might dwell. Places are defined by their boundaries, so in part 3 we turn to ignorance as boundary. The boundary of a place of ignorance is both a reclusion and a threshold to knowledge. When we dwell within knowledge, however, we confront ignorance at the boundary of what is known. Mapping the geography of ignorance is the goal, and so I now turn to the epistemic landscape and its boundaries.