There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I was a child, my elementary school sent home report cards that were bluish-green bifolds in a brown envelope. The inner left-hand page listed the various academic subjects and my grades for each six-week period. The right-hand page listed various aspects of “citizenship,” including my attendance record, “times tardy,” and a list of traits or behavior patterns that the teacher evaluated with an “S” or “U” (for “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory”) or even a gold star. They were the virtues of a good school citizen. Some of them were designed to encourage the sort of docility and deportment conducive to an orderly class: “controls talking,” “works well with others,” and “follows instructions.” (Versions of these same traits, I later learned, were also quite popular on report cards in countries with totalitarian regimes.) But there were other traits that seem more directly relevant to learning: “pays attention,” “works up to ability,” and “practices self-control.” These were my introduction to epistemic virtues. Oh, it would have seemed better, in a democratic epistemic community, if the school authorities had also elevated such traits as “thinks independently” or “reasons logically,” but their list is nonetheless important and perhaps more basic.
This bifolded view of learning is reflected in traditional epistemology, in which the focus is on knowledge as a cognitive structure (the left-hand page), not on the process of coming to know (the right-hand page). To use Hans Reichenbach’s well-known distinction, epistemology is usually directed toward the “context of justification,” and has no interest in the “context of discovery.”1 How one learns is left to psychologists and educators. Technically, analytic epistemology views knowledge as a set of propositions: justified, true beliefs.2 This is compatible with common conceptions of knowledge as something one may possess, a cognitive fund from which one may draw.
Nevertheless, it is also illuminating to regard knowledge as an epistemic achievement, as success in the effort to learn. Taking this “right-hand page” viewpoint directs our attention to the labor, the skills, the mental faculties, and relevant dispositions that facilitate such an accomplishment—the epistemic virtues—along with the obstacles and vices that inhibit it.
Let us take a virtue to be a trait that is conducive to success in a purposeful activity; vices are traits that tend to inhibit such success. Traits are virtuous or vicious in relation to that activity and to the larger practice or enterprise encompassing such activity. Having a heavy body weight is a virtue for the actions of a sumo wrestler, but likely a vice for a baseball shortstop. In playing poker, it is irrelevant. If we then take our purposeful activity to be the pursuit of knowledge, it is not difficult to develop at least a preliminary list of epistemic virtues. The researcher, the inquirer, the detective, the investigator—all knowledge-seekers—might find virtue in being open-minded but judiciously skeptical, in having intellectual courage and imagination, in attending to evidence and to the credibility of sources, in remaining exact and considered in judgment—and, as my report cards suggested, in paying attention, persevering, and displaying self-control. The list of epistemic vices that inhibit the search for knowledge begins with similar ease: rigidity of thought, obtuseness, prejudice, disregard for evidence, gullibility, and so on (the reverse of the traits listed above).
This approach is known as “virtue epistemology.” Its roots are traceable to Aristotle, who first distinguished intellectual virtues from moral virtues (though he then interrelated them);3 but it emerged in its contemporary form in a set of essays in the 1980s by Ernest Sosa,4 and has since been elaborated and refined by many others. It has opened new lines of inquiry, sometimes with the hope that it might benefit traditional problems of epistemology, but increasingly with the conviction that it is a valuable approach in its own right, offering novel and important insights. One group of thinkers, including Sosa, attends primarily to the normative functioning of those faculties that are engaged in achieving knowledge, such as sensation, memory, introspection, intuition, and the like. Another group, including Linda Zagzebski, Robert C. Roberts, W. Jay Wood, and others, focuses on particular epistemic virtues and vices.5 They have produced intriguing analyses of such epistemic traits as curiosity, humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and caution, persistence, and respect for evidence; and of intellectual vices, such as gullibility, cognitive inertia, and intellectual dishonesty. Both groups agree that the epistemic virtues are dependent in some way on cognitive faculties.
This approach allows us to reconnect process with product, learning to knowing, and education to epistemology. It serves to bridge Reichenbach’s two contexts, though there is less preoccupation and patience with the thorny issues of justification. The normative concern remains, of course: that is, the result is regulative in the sense that it aims to guide practice. But the normative spotlight is now on the individual who seeks to know.
While this is an exciting and long-overdue development, I want to advocate three supplementary elaborations of what I take to be the now-standard view of virtue epistemologists. The natural focus of this approach is acquisitionist; that is, a focus on traits related to the pursuit or acquisition of knowledge. It is also expedient, in the context of virtues and vices, to think in terms of an individual searcher who displays them. My first point is that epistemic virtues and vices may be displayed not only in the pursuit, but also in the possession, the protection, the transmission, and the application of knowledge. Second, these aspects remind us that we are individuals in epistemic communities; we are not just autodidacts and solo knowers. Many virtues and vices are manifested in epistemic interactions with other people: they are related to ways in which we withhold and share information and to our regard for other informants.
The virtue approach shares with traditional epistemology the assumption that knowledge (which rests on truth) is not just the premier epistemic value; it is the sole and unqualified epistemic value (though it is, of course, dependent on truth). Knowledge is the goal; it is good, and the more the better. And the more widely it is possessed, the better: the greatest knowledge for the greatest number, one might say. My third point is that we have just discussed circumstances in which not knowing is right and sometimes good (chapter 7). Taking account of such ignorance is quite possible with a virtues epistemology framework, but only if we introduce the possibility that judicious ignorance has value within a community too. Once we do that, we can include such candidates for epistemic virtue as discretion, caution, and keeping one’s counsel, along with vices such as blabbing, nosiness, and the propensity to offer (in Internet parlance) TMI—“too much information.”
Adding these three dimensions expands the promise of virtue epistemology. In this chapter, I propose to extend this discussion by examining received claims for various virtues and vices of ignorance. To begin, let us turn to a contested attribute (and incidentally, another trait that never appeared on my report cards): curiosity.
Curiosity may refer to an ephemeral, occurrent attitude or emotion, or it may denote a stable quality of character. It is the difference between, say, a passing curiosity about the price of a luxury car and the trait of being naturally curious about the world. A suitable definition for the ephemeral usage of curiosity is “having a focused or eager desire to know X.” The trait of curiosity could be interpreted simply as the tendency to display occurrent curiosity, but it is more informative to define it as “a general inquisitiveness or interest in knowledge, explanation, and understanding.” To put it in our reverse language, both senses of the term refer to the desire to remove ignorance. So, is curiosity an epistemic virtue or a vice?
In Classical Greece and Rome, curiosity (periergia in Greek; curiositas in Latin) was generally considered a vice,6 though we might identify three separate conceptions. In the first, curiosity is a vulgar character flaw, identified with snooping, eavesdropping, peeping, and pursuing useless inquiries (what we might call idle curiosity), and usually accompanied by gossiping, blabbing, and voyeurism. The second interpretation exploits the etymological entanglement between the Greek word for curiosity, periergia, and perierga, which means strange. It highlights the strangeness that arouses our curiosity and the accompanying danger it portends, often through myths and morality tales: Pandora’s curiosity releases all life’s evils; Psyche’s obsessive curiosity results in successive, dire plights; and the metamorphosed Lucius’s picaresque sojourn as a donkey is precipitated by his curiosity about magic spells.7 Especially when directed to the dark arts or to forbidden knowledge, curiosity can kill.
The third conception regards curiosity as a sin. This seems to begin with the Stoics, but once adopted by early Christians like Tertullian, it greatly influenced Christian theology for centuries. The core idea is that the only knowledge that is worthwhile is knowledge that pertains to the Divine, including one’s own conduct in relation to God. All other knowledge is useless; to pursue it is vanity; and curiosity about it is sinful. It is difficult to find a Christian theologian from this long period who doesn’t condemn curiosity, though Augustine and Thomas Aquinas seek to distinguish intellectual curiosity from its more vulgar forms. Thomists, more Aristotelian in spirit than Stoic, usually attempt to identify subject matter that is worthy of learning—studies of nature, practical studies, studies useful for governance, and so on. To pursue literary studies, liberal arts, theoretical studies without practical import, was for many theologians a form of misdirected, perhaps sinful, curiosity.
Modernists, however, tilt toward judging curiosity a virtue, indeed the key epistemic virtue. Proto-modernist Thomas Hobbes thought that curiosity—“the desire to know why and how”—was found “in no living creature but Man,” and therefore humankind was “distinguished not only by his Reason, but also by this singular Passion.”8 And curiosity is valuable: for the Enlightenment, curiosity is the motive force of scientific inquiry and its patiently systematic advancement of our knowledge of the world. In wresting secrets from Nature, we will not find unless we are moved to seek. Not only “natural philosophers,” but also progressive educators prize intellectual curiosity and work to arouse it in those who seem uninterested in learning.9
The deepest etymological roots of curiosity lead to the Latin word cura (care).10 To be curious is to care about what lies beyond the boundary of our knowing. As eros is the yearning for beauty, so curiosity is the yearning for truth. But like erotic love, epistemic love can include the vulgar, the dangerous, and the wrongful. Moreover, the urge to tell can overcome discretion.
There is wonderful moment in Berthold Brecht’s play, Galileo, a garden scene in which a “Little Priest,” despite his training in physics, urges Galileo to repress his desire to know and to publish things that will only disturb long-held beliefs and rile the peaceful order. Galileo, serpent in the Garden, tempts the priest with his manuscript on the tides: “Here is writ what draws the ocean when it ebbs and flows. Let it lie there. Thou shalt not read.”11 But of course the priest can’t resist and picks up the text. Galileo gloats, “Already! An apple of the tree of knowledge, he can’t wait, he wolfs it down. He will rot in Hell for all eternity.” But then, in words that echo Plato’s cave, he offers poignant self-recognition: “Sometimes I think I would let them imprison me in a place a thousand feet beneath the earth, where no light could reach me, if in exchange I could find out what stuff that is: ‘Light.’ The bad thing is that, when I find something, I have to boast about it like a lover or a drunkard or a traitor. That is a hopeless vice, and leads to the abyss.”
It is not surprising that an epistemic disposition like curiosity is subject to moral concerns. The intense desire to discover (and to tell) can become obsessive, and its persistence is tainted when it is directed toward subjects that are forbidden, dangerous, worthless, or that should be occluded by the privacy of others. And if its satisfaction, the truth gained and told, is likely to be deeply disruptive of the established order, curiosity is discouraged by those in power and a curtain of willful ignorance may fall—as Galileo witnessed in his trial and subsequent prohibition against publication. But skepticism regarding establishmentarian censorship is wise. We know that moral currency is widely counterfeited, and a halo of pious rhetoric often hides the real motive and value of the claims. There is no substitute for practical wisdom in these matters. Traits of character form an ecology: the value of curiosity, like other traits, is shaped by its relationship to other traits and circumstances.
The philosopher Neil Manson identified the four factors I applied in discussing epistemic ethics: process, content, purpose, and context. I used them in the evaluation of knowledge, but Manson introduced them as factors that affect the virtuousness or viciousness of curiosity.12 Recall that process refers to the means of pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. No doubt, curiosity may be dangerous because of the methods employed, the authorities disrupted, the activities involved (such as intrusive prying), or because of collateral, damaging revelations that come with success. One might imagine a journalist’s investigation, for example, that involves all of these elements. But the process of curious inquiry may also display intellectual courage, brilliant research technique, dogged effort, and a judiciousness that avoids jumping to conclusions.13
The content of the knowledge sought may be ethically significant independent of the methods used to acquire it: it may be forbidden or restricted or hazardous in itself; it may worthless, trivial, or disgusting; or it may be knowledge that, however acquired, is awkward because it violates privacy or confidentiality. There are also opportunity costs in the acquisition of knowledge, and the quality of one’s judgment about what knowledge is worth pursuing can reveal epistemic virtues and vices. There is epistemic virtue in the astute selection of promising lines of research over blind alleys. We might imagine a virtue—in my old report card’s language, “uses time wisely”—which polarizes an opposing vice: the unwise use of learning time, such as spending hours to acquire information about the affairs of the cast of a reality show instead of, oh, learning about the Civil War or pursuing research on cancer. Curiosity, in short, is tainted when it is directed at unworthy content.
The purpose one has in seeking knowledge is also significant. Thomas Aquinas observed that “those who study to learn something in order to sin are engaged in a sinful study.”14 This is a case of the ends infecting the means. If we replace “sinful” with “morally wrong,” we can surely find cases that fit Aquinas’s category. Manson gives us the case of two researchers who are studying whether ingesting a certain substance will cause pain. One has the vicious purpose of finding a more effective means of torturing captives for his brutal state’s regime; the other is seeking a cure for bowel cancer and wants to minimize side effects—a virtuous purpose.15
Context includes the many aspects I listed earlier (chapter 7), including our relationships and roles; the epistemic rights and responsibilities of others; the immediate social context and the protocols of the relevant epistemic community. Manson gives several excellent examples of how these facts can poison even an otherwise pure desire to know, but I will summarize only one here: A man who is curious about the value of a porcelain figurine he owns proceeds to ask detailed questions of an expert (so far, a reasonable desire to know), but he does this while the expert is grieving at the funeral for his young daughter (an inappropriate social context for the pursuit of this information).16 His lack of sensitivity and judgment taints his curiosity.
As Manson notes, even a thoroughgoing analysis of curiosity as vice and virtue still focuses on the desire to gain knowledge. He champions an alternative virtue directed toward ignorance, which he calls epistemic restraint. This is not a virtue in how we form beliefs (like open-mindedly weighing evidence and noting its reach, assuring consistency with known truths, or judging the credibility of testimony); it is rather a virtue that values not desiring to know (not pursuing knowledge, not knowing) and seeks to protect ignorance when it is appropriate. To celebrate epistemic restraint is not to endorse anti-intellectualism or to reject scientific inquiry. But it does challenge the simplistic view that the desire to know is always and everywhere a good and proper motive, and the assumption that acquiring knowledge is to be valued without reference to methods or content or context. In short, Manson builds into the conception of epistemic restraint proper sensitivity to the ethical issues of process, content, purpose, and context—issues that are left open in the neutral concept of curiosity.
Discretion is a virtue that primarily concerns the protection and sharing of knowledge and ignorance, rather than the pursuit of knowledge or the formation of belief. With etymological roots in the ability to separate or distinguish, discretion refers to a moral discernment, the power to make salient distinctions in social contexts. Thus a discreet person is one who avoids speaking or behaving in such a way as to violate privacy or confidentiality or to cause offense, except for due cause; she has sensitivity to and sound judgment regarding the ethical issues that arise in the relationships of an epistemic community.
One who is discreet appreciates the occasional value of ignorance, or at least the value of keeping one’s counsel and of certain people not knowing particular things at a specific time. The intent is not to manipulate people, but to serve ethical as well as the epistemic guidelines. Discretion will occasionally require resistance to requests for information, to the prying efforts of busybodies, and to the sharing of dangerous knowledge with inappropriate individuals. It will reject not only improper divulgence of information, but also the attempt to gain social status through what one knows and will or will not tell. The heart of this virtue is good judgment in epistemic interactions.
Looking even so briefly at discretion reminds us yet again that epistemic virtues and vices are manifested by individuals in an epistemic community. The value of discretion or epistemic restraint, for example, will not appear when one attends only to the solo search for knowledge. And both epistemic restraint and discretion show that ignorance may be valued in epistemic interactions.
Sissela Bok has written, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”17 Her wise observation includes what matters to us epistemically as well. Our epistemic interactions thrive when we can trust our sources and informants, and they us; when we can rely on the discretion of others, and they on ours; when we trust each other to carry out our epistemic obligations—and when such trust is justified.
“Trust” can be a noun or a verb; that is, trust can be a state or an action. Trust and doubt both arise within ignorance. To trust is to extend credibility and forgo continual verification or justification;18 to doubt is to deny credibility absent compelling independent evidence or proof. Trust not only arises in ignorance (if I know certain information myself, I do not need to trust another’s testimony regarding it); trust extends both confident credence and ignorance: if one partner trusts another, he does not continually ascertain his partner’s whereabouts, corroborate claims, or search possessions. To trust is to be willingly vulnerable. If my trust is misplaced, I have opened myself to exploitation, hurt, and loss. It is the willingness of trust that makes poignant the vulnerability of ignorance.
Most of our knowledge comes from others. Yet “testimony,” as epistemologists call information received from others, is somewhat devalued in traditional theory because it is second-hand. (Recall the emphasis on the solo, autonomous knower.) In an epistemic community, however, we rely—indeed we must rely—on the testimony of others. Skeptics refuse. But no one has the time or energy or will to track down and personally verify all the information one must use in a day. My calendar this morning claims it is Lincoln’s birthday. Just imagine what it would take to verify just that one claim first-hand. Instead, I rely on what my fourth grade teacher told me, what my calendar reports, what the Internet sources or textbooks state, or what a Lincoln scholar says. But all of these sources provide mediated knowledge. Even scientists who seek first-hand information must rely on the knowledge provided by other scientists, including those in other disciplines, and on the engineers who designed their instruments. For the epistemic good, we work on trust, extending at least initial credence to those who teach and tell us. Knowledge thrives in a trustworthy environment, which involves the acceptance, even the affirmation, of ignorance.
Unfortunately, this also means that epistemic communities are vulnerable, and indeed they are—to fraud, misinformation, rumor, outright lies and subtler deceptions, exaggeration, secrecy, incompetence, and violations of privacy and confidentiality. Political discourse has been poisoned by all of these sins and, as a result, trust in political discourse has withered. It is now very difficult for even truthful political claims to be believed. The integrity of science is threatened by premature publication, fraudulent data, biased research, sensational claims, and retracted conclusions. Those who reject inconvenient scientific conclusions, such as evolution or climate change, engage in doubt-mongering, which undermines the trust in science generally and fosters ignorance. A once-trusted friend caught in an important lie will not be trusted again. Sadly, restoring trust is more difficult than earning trust in the first place.
It is prudent, of course, to extend trust cautiously based on knowledge; but, in the end, trust (like faith) is a commitment one makes, a risk one decides to take; it creates a sphere in which epistemic standards are relaxed and sharing knowledge becomes more efficient. But being trustful is always perilously close to being gullible. Being trustworthy, however, requires epistemic competence and a set of epistemic virtues. The prudent person reduces the risk that comes with ignorance, one element of which is to trust only the trustworthy. As we shall see (chapter 10), we have developed numerous instruments and techniques to reduce the risk associated with trust, either by certifying trustworthiness or bypassing the need for trust.
One might perhaps confuse trust with willful ignorance, since both involve the voluntary acceptance of ignorance. But willful ignorance involves a resistance to knowing; it arises from fear; it often entails self-deception or false knowledge; and it discounts contrary evidence. Epistemic trust is not resistant to knowledge; it requires a minor form of courage; it involves a commitment not to seek evidence; and it can be broken by contrary evidence. Both are painful when broken.
To this point, we have not focused on the arena of the application of knowledge for epistemic virtues and vices. To that end, I want to look at another recent work on ignorance: The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge, a collection of essays edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson.19 Because it summarizes the message of this unified anthology nicely, I will quote from the dustjacket for the book:
The contributors argue that uncritical faith in scientific knowledge has created many of the problems now threatening the planet and that our wholesale reliance on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. … [They] offer profound arguments for the advantage of an ignorance-based worldview. … All conclude that we must simply accept the proposition that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will. Rejecting the belief that science and technology are benignly at the service of society, the authors argue that recognizing ignorance might be the only path to reliable knowledge.
The summary is accurate and informative, and I wish to mark several points:
(1) The book is primarily concerned with the application of knowledge in determining public policy, especially regarding practices and decisions that affect the natural environment and shape the built environment. It is also true, however, that they argue that “recognizing ignorance might be the only path to reliable knowledge,” which is a claim about inquiry. (2) The authors are concerned with an epistemic vice: the overconfidence in what we know, especially as seen in our undue reliance on science and technology. They charge that this has resulted in policies and practices that are ineffective, and—often because of unintended consequences—self-defeating, and disastrous for the environment and human society. (3) Reliable knowledge, as distinguished from false knowledge and belief, remains their ultimate goal. (4) The authors advocate an “ignorance-based” worldview, but this seems to amount to recognizing our ignorance.20 In practice, this means developing and implementing policies with caution and alertness to side effects, long-term implications, unintended consequences, opportunity costs, sustainability, and so on. Although they do not provide detailed strategies for mapping relevant ignorance (and recall the difficulty of determining “relevant” ignorance), they do argue that “those who hold an ignorance-based view” actually learn more. (5) It is the recognition of ignorance that is virtuous in this presentation, not the ignorance itself; despite its provocative title, the real virtue lauded here is intellectual humility. And for that, the authors collectively make a compelling case.
It seems clear that the intellectual humility that follows from recognition of our own ignorance is an epistemic virtue. It is unwise in pursuing knowledge on one’s own or in one’s epistemic interactions to be arrogant, overconfident, judgmental, or resistant to new information and correction—and the same is true when we apply our knowledge.
A traditional virtue with a subtle connection to humility is modesty. In this case, the etymological roots trace back to the Latin, modus, which means “measure or manner” and its derivative, modestia, which means “moderation or prudent conduct.” But it is with Christianity that modesty becomes a self-regarding, self-effacing virtue distinct from moderation. Perhaps because Aristotle saw all virtues as forms of moderation that avoided excesses and insufficiencies, or because of the lingering influence of the warrior hero image, he had not regarded personal modesty as a virtue.
In a paper published in 1989, Julia Driver argued that modesty is, as her title termed it, one of “The Virtues of Ignorance.”21 What she means by this, and the argument she makes for it, is worth our attention here, and it has generated several lively rebuttals. She claims that modesty is a virtue that depends on, indeed requires, ignorance. Her argument proceeds as follows:
Driver thus has laid out a provocative position that bristles with points of controversy. I join several philosophical critics in wondering: why, under her account, is modesty a virtue? How is it different from error, self-deception, or illusion? Why is it not simply a recurring epistemic mistake?
Most readers agree with her observation (5) that there is something odd about asserting “I am modest”; but most respondents have disagreed with her characterization (4) of modesty as the systematic underestimation of self-worth. And some have noted that her account of blind charity is also troublesome and might even describe a vice more than a virtue.
Owen Flanagan responded quickly.22 He argues that Driver makes an important but false claim when she says there is a class of virtues such that “If the agent knows that she has the virtue, she does not.” He claims that the oddness of “I am modest” is a performative oddity, not one of direct self-contradiction. In fact, he argues, a person can be genuinely modest and know it, but the occasions and circumstances under which it would be appropriate to assert it are rather limited. Bragging that one is modest would be self-contradictory. Although Flanagan accepts Driver’s analytical framework of modesty as related to evaluation of self-worth, he takes the position that it is a disposition not to overestimate one’s self-worth. Therefore, error and ignorance are not entailed. Just the opposite: modesty requires epistemic restraint (to impose Manson’s term) and practical wisdom; it arises from the desire not to overreach, not to exaggerate or overstate one’s worth or accomplishments.
George Frederick Schueler had an interesting exchange with Driver in the late 1990s.23 Schueler also found her account of modesty to be problematic. He counters with the case of the third-best physicist in the world who thought he was the fifth-best physicist and regularly bragged about it: on Driver’s account, he would be a modest man, consistently underestimating his accomplishments. Schueler, however, rejected estimation-of-self-worth theories—both Driver’s and Flanagan’s—arguing that modesty is the lack of desire to be evaluated for one’s accomplishments. Thus, it is not tied to error and ignorance.
Nicolas Bommarito offered a different interpretation: modesty is “a virtue of attention” that directs one’s attention away from one’s own accomplishments and toward other matters.24 It is, therefore, a matter not of self-knowledge or ignorance, but of where one places one’s attention and concern.
My quick sketch of these positions cannot do justice to the richness of this dialogue (nor to other participants),25 but suffice it to say that Driver has generally reaffirmed her arguments in rebuttals to her respondents. Nonetheless, I do not find her account of modesty satisfactory. Modesty is not a virtue of ignorance. I too reject the interpretation of modesty as a systematic estimation error based on ignorance of one’s self-worth, and the notion that such a trait could be a virtue. While there are virtues that require recognition of one’s ignorance, such as humility, I do not believe there are virtues that rest on ignorance, or virtues that exist only if one is ignorant that one possesses them.
Precisely the same issues arise with the cardinal virtue, wisdom. It seems a kind of contradiction or performative oddity to say “I am wise.” But that is because it would not be wise to assert one’s wisdom. It does not require that the wise person make the systematic error of underestimating her own understanding. And it does not mean that one is not wise unless one is ignorant of one’s wisdom. Wisdom surely requires knowing what one understands and what one does not—and acknowledging the factor of unknown unknowns.
An unusual and bold claim for the virtue of ignorance is made by the French postmodernist philosopher Jacques Rancière, in a fascinating work titled, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.26 As he later commented, his book takes “a most unreasonable position: That the most important quality of a schoolmaster is the virtue of ignorance.”27
Rancière recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot, a teacher who created “quite a scandal in the Holland and France of the 1830s.” Jacotot was assigned to teach French to students who spoke only Flemish—a language he himself did not know. He found a bilingual text and, with the help of an interpreter, told the students to read the first half of the text, using the translation, and to rehearse repeatedly what they had learned; then they should read the second half of the book briskly, ending by writing in French what they had learned. He was amazed at the result: without directly imparting any knowledge to his students, they had learned to express themselves in French remarkably well. Jacotot proceeded to “teach” other subjects of which he was ignorant in the same way—and claimed to achieve similar success. He reached the provocative conclusion that one who is ignorant might enable another who is ignorant to come to know something previously unknown to both. He declared and promoted this approach as an emancipatory method of “universal education.” A good teacher is virtuously ignorant.
Set aside the empirical questions of whether such a method works for all students and all subjects (for these are outside our concern), and turn instead to the claim that it is an “emancipatory” pedagogy. Traditionally, teaching is viewed as the attempt to transmit knowledge (possessed by the teacher) to the ignorant (the pupils); the acquisition of this knowledge is liberating for the students. Thus, knowing facilitates explanations that convey understanding, which is then emancipating—or so the standard view claims, according to Jacotot and Rancière. In actuality, they say, this transmission of knowledge is an imperialism of intellect, a coercion of the pupils’ minds into established patterns of thought to obtain the “correct” answers and proficiency as judged by the teacher. They point out (a now familiar point) that those who know have power over those who are ignorant, exhibited even in the ascription of their ignorance; and teaching-as-transmission-of-knowledge is an official imposition of that power. The result of knowledge-based teaching is, in fact, stultifying, not liberating.
This is not to be understood as a rediscovery of the Socratic method, according to Rancière, which he regards as questioning based on a feigned ignorance that is designed to elicit a response already known to the master. Jacotot’s pedagogy, by contrast, relies on the genuine ignorance of the “master.” There is a disconnection between what the schoolmaster knows and the knowledge he facilitates—and indeed the teacher may not certify the “correctness” of the outcome, says Rancière. (One may wonder how Jacotot knew that his innovative method succeeded.) Both men laud this pedagogy as proceeding under the assumption of human equality, the postulate that teacher and student are equal in their ability to learn and to understand, rather than the traditional model of the teacher’s epistemic authority and superiority. It is thus a truly emancipatory education.
For Rancière, the implications are larger than pedagogical strategy: his analysis is a key part of a larger postmodernist political critique and a “new logic of emancipation.”28 The freedom that democracy promises is not something one person can give another; all genuine emancipation is ultimately self-emancipation. Those who would attempt to emancipate us through knowledge—like the unnamed liberator of the prisoner in Plato’s Cave and perhaps the serpent in the Garden—do the opposite. They exercise the epistemic power of master over disciple, and they proffer cognitive enslavement by leading us to adopt their own truth.
The American philosopher Richard Rorty famously contrasted the right and left views of education, saying that those on the right begin with truth, saying “Know the Truth, and the truth shall set you free,” while those on the left put freedom first, saying “Assure freedom, and the truth will take care of itself.”29 For Rancière, however, it is equality, especially the equality of human intelligence, which must be presumed, though we can never know it to be true. Freedom cannot be assured anyway; it must be earned. His is undoubtedly a utopian vision: “We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence.”30
A related theme seems to inform Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film, Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). In its multilayered plot, the protagonist, Riggan Thomson, is a wasted actor whose signature movie role was a superhero, Birdman. Riggan is delusional, hallucinatory, and tormented by the mocking, inner voice of Birdman; he is unable to find love. To resuscitate his career, he pursues the wild idea of writing, acting, and directing a Broadway production. Lacking relevant experience—his lead actor says Riggan doesn’t even know what his own play is about—he perseveres: in defiance of critics and despite numerous disasters, fights, and a suicide attempt, the play goes forward. Amazingly, from ignorance, Riggan has created a masterpiece. Its creativity and superrealistic power could not have come from those who are knowledgeable, experienced, and expert in the realities of Broadway production.31
But let us return to Rancière’s schoolmaster and zoom in on the “virtue of ignorance.” I understand Rancière’s central claims to be: (a) paradoxically, a teacher’s state of ignorance about the subject matter is conducive to student learning—provided the right method is used; (b) the effect of ignorance-based teaching is genuinely “emancipatory,” whereas knowledge-based teaching is cognitively enslaving; and (c) ignorance is therefore a virtue in teaching.
In evaluating these claims, I want to be cautious and not let the conclusion drawn outstrip the evidence (to apply another epistemic virtue). Let us assume that Jacotot’s account of his pedagogical success is factual, and (this is more of a stretch) that the method is universally effective with students. The method he advocates involves the teacher’s genuine ignorance of the subject matter (not ignorance in general); the provision of modest resources for self-teaching (in his original case, a bilingual text); and students’ engagement in independent and self-directed learning activities.
What triggered Jacotot’s discovery of this method was his complete ignorance of the language his students spoke—he did, of course, know French, the targeted language. He shifted in later experiments to his ignorance of the targeted subject matter. One might wonder: would not the method work just as well if the teacher were to feign ignorance, hypocrisy aside? If the method has a distinctive genius, would it not lie in the teacher’s activities, the nature of the assignments given the students, and the forms of acceptable learning outcomes—not in the teacher’s lack of knowledge? Rancière rejects this, claiming that a teacher who feigns ignorance will not be able to restrain the impulse to correct and explain, to subtly direct the students to preestablished learning goals. But even genuine ignorance alone seems insufficient to accomplish emancipatory learning as Rancière describes it; one needs the rest of the pedagogy Jacotot describes. Suppose one argues as follows, which I believe Rancière does: because ignorance of the subject can contribute to emancipatory teaching, the way to achieve that is to assure the teacher’s ignorance of the subject. This is a variety of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, assuming causality from sequence. Just as although a truck always sounds a beeping warning before it reverses, we cannot deduce that the beeping causes the truck to reverse, so we cannot conclude the students learned because the teacher was ignorant of the subject matter.
Then there is that shift in Jacotot’s examples. In the original case of teaching French to Flemish-speaking students, Jacotot was surprised at his success; but he knew he was successful precisely because he knew French himself. It was Flemish he did not know. He was not, in other words, ignorant of the target subject; in fact, he applied his knowledge in selecting the bilingual textbook and in evaluating students’ written work. But he then began to target subjects of which he was ignorant, and it is then that the issue of determining what success might mean becomes complicated. What are the self-evident markers of genuine learning that the ignorant schoolmaster discerned in his students? Did he rely on student self-assessment? Must one invoke experts to assess the outcome? How does one know that genuine learning has occurred? Rancière wants to avoid prescribing learning goals in advance, allowing for multiple valid outcomes. But the question remains: on what basis can one affirm the success of this method? And if these questions still seem tainted with a colonialism of thought, is it even possible, under Rancière’s account, to retain a goal of gaining any genuine knowledge; or is the very concept of knowledge antithetical to the emancipation of thought he seeks? If we give up the concept of knowledge, we lose the concept of ignorance as well.
The radical pedagogy Rancière prescribes requires the presumption of equal intelligence. There is, as a result, no individualized teaching, no reason to address any student’s special needs or skills, no chance to harness personal interests. All instructional feedback is viewed as didactic correction. The energy that can emanate from a teacher’s enthusiasm for a subject is banned. Beyond providing a prompt, the method thereafter is reduced to independent study.32
Nevertheless, so much seems perceptive and important in Rancière’s text: his critique of didacticism as the model of teaching; his framing of explication as an exercise of the power of knowledge over ignorance; his insistence on the epistemic potential of the teacher and every pupil; his demand for emancipation through learning coupled with an alertness to the stultifying effects of teaching for “correctness”; and his insight into the relationship of education and political life. Implicitly, he has revealed the ways in which knowledge defines ignorance. Though he and Jacotot have shown how ignorance may sometimes be liberating for a teacher (and students), that does not elevate it to a virtue for teachers. It is rather that the state of ignorance may sometimes release the virtues and suppress the vices of teaching.
Given the discussions of this and the previous chapter, an adequate regulative epistemology should guide us not only in the acquisition of knowledge, but in the construction, imposition, and protection of ignorance. It should guide our epistemic interactions within communities, not just in our solo pursuit of knowledge. Gaining knowledge is often an achievement that requires skillful use of our cognitive faculties and epistemic virtues; it usually relies on others. But, although I am reluctant to call ignorance an achievement, its wise recognition, construction, protection, imposition, and divulgence may require skillful use of our faculties and epistemic virtues. Indeed, some virtues, like intellectual humility, discretion, and trust, are possible only in relation to ignorance. Some of these are possible only in epistemic interactions with others. Ignorance has its uses, but wisdom and virtue lie in our actions regarding it. Being ignorant per se is not a virtue.33