The Philosophy World

Abstract

In contemporary epistemology, the debates on the nature of knowledge focus on what conditions are necessary for knowledge and to what extent the proposed conditions are sufficient. Epistemically speaking, knowledge is a good status and the conditions that ensure it are the grounds for knowledge to be a good status. In contrast, investigations into why ignorance, which can be considered as the anti-position of knowledge, is a bad status are quite new. Although the definition of ignorance as a classical understanding is considered as the absence of knowledge, recent objections have brought to the agenda that the deprication of the conditions that provide knowledge cannot always be characterized as ignorance. This approach, which is called the new view, considers ignorance as the absence of true belief rather than knowledge in the strong sense that requires high criteria. However, there are difficulties in explaining the nature of ignorance for the new view. As an alternative view, the normative approach argues that ignorance has a normative nature and should be considered as an intellectual failure. In this paper, the debate on ignorance is analyzed through an explanation of why ignorance is a bad epistemic state. That is, just as there are reasons for accepting knowledge as a good epistemic status, the reasons why ignorance is a bad epistemic status should also be explained. However, defining ignorance as a lack of knowledge or true belief does not provide a sufficient explanation. The claim of the study is that the normative view is the most successful theory in this regard. Nevertheless, it is argued that the normative view has problematic aspects in judging some situations that are difficult to characterize as ignorance.