The Ignorant Skeptic/The Skeptical Ignoramus Paradox
[quote=Wikipedia]The word "ignorant" is an adjective that describes a person in the 1. state of being unaware, or even 2. cognitive dissonance and 3. other cognitive relation, and can describe individuals who deliberately ignore or disregard important information or facts, or 4. individuals who are unaware of important information or facts. Ignorance can appear in three different types: 5. factual ignorance (absence of knowledge of some fact), 6. object ignorance (lack of acquaintance with some object), and 7. technical ignorance (absence of knowledge of how to do something)[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]Skepticism (American and Canadian English) or scepticism (British, Irish, and Australian English) is 8. generally a questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more putative instances of knowledge which are asserted to be mere belief or dogma. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology. More informally, 9. skepticism as an expression of questioning or doubt can be applied to any topic, such as politics, religion, or pseudoscience. It is often applied within restricted domains, such as morality (moral skepticism), theism (skepticism about the existence of God), or the supernatural.
Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. 10. Radical forms of philosophical skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge us to suspend judgment on many or all controversial matters. 11. More moderate forms of philosophical skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about non-empirical matters, such as whether God exists, whether human beings have free will, or whether there is an afterlife.[/quote]
I've numbered the important aspects of both ignorance and skepticism in the above excerpts from their respective Wikipedia entries.
For starters, I'd like to tell you what I think about these two epistemological states.
As far as I can tell, a person's relationship, if we could call it that, with a proposition, any proposition, p, begins with what I refer to as the basic epistemological assumption: Either p is true OR p is false. This, in logic, is the tautology (p v ~p) or the law of the excluded middle.
Taking point 1 and 5 into consideration, ignorance is a state in which one is unaware of a certain fact and a fact, to me, is a proposition and being unaware of a fact simply means that one doesn't know whether the concerned proposition is true, facts being true propositions. In other words, ignorance means one doesn't know/isn't aware that a given fact is true. Thus if someone is ignorant in re a proposition p, it means that person doesn't know p is true when, actually, p is true (p is a fact). This simply means that (p v ~p) for the ignoramus - fae is unable to progress beyond this point.
Coming to skepticism, look at at points 10 and 11 in the excerpt above which states that skepticism is a position that denies the possibility of [certain] knowledge which amounts to saying, given a proposition p, it's either not possible to establish that p is true/false or that any attempts to prove p is true is always going to be marked by a certain degree of uncertainty. Another way of expressing the skeptic's epistemological state is (p v ~p) - fae too can't progress beyond this point.
Note a few points here:
1. Whether one is a skeptic or an ignorant, in both cases we're left in limbo, stuck as it were with what I introduced earlier as the basic epistemological assumption regarding any and all propositions, p, viz. (p v ~p). In this regard, there's no difference between a skeptic and an ignoramus - both are unable to determine which of the two possibilities, p or ~p, obtains.
2. Skepticism implies the nonexistence of ignorance for as per the former there's no such thing as knowledge, no such things as facts, and if there are no facts, the question of being unaware of facts is moot and if so, ignorance is an impossibility.
3 If there's such a thing as ignorance then, skepticism can't be true for the former implies that there are certain facts (knowledge) that some of us aren't aware of.
There's no difference, in epistemological terms (does anything else matter?), between skepticism and ignorance since both know only that (p v ~p) but skepticism, if true, implies the nonexistence of ignorance. This is the paradox!
[quote=Wikipedia]Skepticism (American and Canadian English) or scepticism (British, Irish, and Australian English) is 8. generally a questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more putative instances of knowledge which are asserted to be mere belief or dogma. Formally, skepticism is a topic of interest in philosophy, particularly epistemology. More informally, 9. skepticism as an expression of questioning or doubt can be applied to any topic, such as politics, religion, or pseudoscience. It is often applied within restricted domains, such as morality (moral skepticism), theism (skepticism about the existence of God), or the supernatural.
Philosophical skepticism comes in various forms. 10. Radical forms of philosophical skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge us to suspend judgment on many or all controversial matters. 11. More moderate forms of philosophical skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about non-empirical matters, such as whether God exists, whether human beings have free will, or whether there is an afterlife.[/quote]
I've numbered the important aspects of both ignorance and skepticism in the above excerpts from their respective Wikipedia entries.
For starters, I'd like to tell you what I think about these two epistemological states.
As far as I can tell, a person's relationship, if we could call it that, with a proposition, any proposition, p, begins with what I refer to as the basic epistemological assumption: Either p is true OR p is false. This, in logic, is the tautology (p v ~p) or the law of the excluded middle.
Taking point 1 and 5 into consideration, ignorance is a state in which one is unaware of a certain fact and a fact, to me, is a proposition and being unaware of a fact simply means that one doesn't know whether the concerned proposition is true, facts being true propositions. In other words, ignorance means one doesn't know/isn't aware that a given fact is true. Thus if someone is ignorant in re a proposition p, it means that person doesn't know p is true when, actually, p is true (p is a fact). This simply means that (p v ~p) for the ignoramus - fae is unable to progress beyond this point.
Coming to skepticism, look at at points 10 and 11 in the excerpt above which states that skepticism is a position that denies the possibility of [certain] knowledge which amounts to saying, given a proposition p, it's either not possible to establish that p is true/false or that any attempts to prove p is true is always going to be marked by a certain degree of uncertainty. Another way of expressing the skeptic's epistemological state is (p v ~p) - fae too can't progress beyond this point.
Note a few points here:
1. Whether one is a skeptic or an ignorant, in both cases we're left in limbo, stuck as it were with what I introduced earlier as the basic epistemological assumption regarding any and all propositions, p, viz. (p v ~p). In this regard, there's no difference between a skeptic and an ignoramus - both are unable to determine which of the two possibilities, p or ~p, obtains.
2. Skepticism implies the nonexistence of ignorance for as per the former there's no such thing as knowledge, no such things as facts, and if there are no facts, the question of being unaware of facts is moot and if so, ignorance is an impossibility.
3 If there's such a thing as ignorance then, skepticism can't be true for the former implies that there are certain facts (knowledge) that some of us aren't aware of.
There's no difference, in epistemological terms (does anything else matter?), between skepticism and ignorance since both know only that (p v ~p) but skepticism, if true, implies the nonexistence of ignorance. This is the paradox!
Comments (11)
Yes, I have to admit that I probably fall into the sceptical ignoramus because I think and read so much that I am overwhelmed and thrown into limbo.
One idea which I think might have some bearing on your debate is Johari's window of knowing which is a quadrant of aspects known to self, those known to both self and others, those known to others and our possible blindspots. I am sure that you can find further details on Wikipedia if you are interested. However, it frames the problem more in a social context, but it is useful for thinking about our knowledge and its limits.
Hope you have a happy Christmas, free from and with plenty of paradoxes,
Jack
You raised an important concern regarding my little excursion into epistemology which, I feel, also applies to everyone, everywhere, and every time to wit. what are the practical applications, and that usually means what are the social benefits, of whatever it is that we undertake?
For my money, skepticism is a vital component of rationality - it's the recommended defensive stance by exponents of critical thinking as there are, quite possibly, an infinite, number of ways in which things could go wrong between you and the acquisition of knowledge - an obstacle course of fallacies, both formal and informal, cognitive biases, deceivers of all shapes and sizes, and just plain old bad luck awaits those who seek truth. Skepticism then, if adopted and practiced well, becomes something of a defense against the dark arts to use a Harry Potter analogy. Many of the ills society is burdened with would've never seen the light of day had people been even a tiny bit skeptical.
Having said that, the OP isn't about that kind of skepticism, doubt that operates under the assumption that knowledge is possible. The skepticism in the OP is of the kind that questions all knowledge, its very existence aka radical skepticism.
The a priori and a posteriori distinction is irrelevant to my point because whether it's either, the matter boils down to a proposition and its truth value and the skeptic's statement that either such can't be determined or that if determined, not with 100% certainty.
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Radical skepticism denies all knowledge including itself, its own claims are given the same treatment as any other claim - they're all met with doubt!
Thank you for your comment!
:up:
Not to contradict you but definitions can't be true/false.
Really, definitions can't be true/false. They're either good or bad depending on how well one adheres to the criteria of a good definition.
Merry Xmas to you to!
Precisely. You don't argue and prove a definition but you need to for a proposition. Stock markets and the Brooklyn bridge are definitions.