Book Reviews August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 47
our ignorance” (p.193). There are gems
throughout the book which guide the reader
to a deeper understanding, including this:“Mapping one’s ignorance also has affective
benefits. Wherever mastery of knowledge
and skills creates professional status, espe-
cially in practices that give professional
power over clients, there arises a natural
pride that rests on what one knows, and a
regrettable tendency for authority to devel-
op arrogance. We know the effects: failure
to listen, premature dismissal of relevant
information, overreaching and overbearing
professional conduct, mistakes and the
denial of them, and so on. An explicit
acknowledgement of ignorance may gener-
ate a corrective humility, a desire to seeThis emphasises that both our knowing
and our understanding in large part depend
upon our psychological aptitudes and dispo-
sitions, which can be either learner oriented
or non-learner oriented. People and societies
that have non-learner dispositions tend to be
only dimly aware of what they do not know,
and generally inactive in rolling back the
boundaries of the unknown.
The author refers to several works by ‘virtue
epistemology’ scholars, and writes, “They
have produced intriguing analyses of such epis-
temic traits as curiosity, humility, open-mind-
edness, intellectual courage and caution,
persistence, and respect for evidence, and of
intellectual vices” (p.116f). I particularly
appreciated DeNicola’s discussion of ‘Igno-
rance and Epistemology’, and his analysis of
the social nature both of not-knowing/not-
understanding and of knowing/understand-
ing, which he frames in terms of ‘epistemic
communities’ (p.57). Philosophers tend to
want to avoid ambiguity, and it’s pleasing to
note the author’s appreciation of ambiguity in
knowing and not-knowing, which he calls a
“continuum or spectrum of epistemic states, as
matters of gradation” (p.73). The gradations
may be overlapping. The mystery of how
much we know or how much we understand
can in a sense take us out of a philosophic mind-
set; but then, the philosophic mind is not the
sum of the human mind, and recognizing that
fact tests the humility of philosophers and non-
philosophers alike.
Those who attentively read Understand-
ing Ignorance will find much that will help
cultivate virtues concerned with how we
know and what we know (this is virtue epis-
temology) which take us out of our cognitive
comfort zone. Readers specifically inter-
ested in virtuous knowing may care to flick
straight through to the Epilogue after read-
ing Chapter 1, especially the sections on
‘Epistemology: Context and Content’,
‘Beyond Propositional Knowledge’,
‘Discovery and Justification’, and ‘Individ-
ual Knowers and Epistemic Communities’.
It’s worth acquiring this book for these
sections alone, and reading the whole work
in light of these sections is likely to increase
the understanding the book imparts.
© REV DR P.A. MCGAVIN 2019
Paul McGavin is a priest, scholar, educator &
pastor of the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goul-
burn, Australia, living in retirement in Sydney.
His email address is: [email protected]- Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact
Of What We Don’t Know, by Daniel DeNicola, MIT
Press 2017, 264 pages, $27.95, ISBN 9780262036443
Books
rather than presume understanding, alert-
ness to unforeseen consequences, and open-
ness to alternative approaches” (p.69f).Many passages like this reveal an author
whose thinking has passed from knowledge
to a wisdom that understands. Yet this very
quote points to an area with which I wrestled
in my reading. To me, DeNicola’s reference
to “overreaching and overbearing profes-
sional conduct, mistakes and the denial of
them” especially describes those who boast
professional knowledge yet who do not know
that they do not know. In their lack of under-
standing they may be unaware of their igno-
rance. The disposition of people who know
less than they think they do works against
learning (after all, they already ‘know’!) and
works against opening-up to different
perspectives – other ways of looking at what
they ‘know’. It also works against the humil-
ity that is an essential condition of wisdom.
Every year I used to say to my students
(referring to a mythical textbook), “No-
one’s going to give you a job for recounting
what’s on p.476. You have to show that you
understand it, and that you can integrate
across different understandings, and apply
that synthesis!” Similarly, DeNicola writes:
“accessing [information] is not learning...
which requires attention and interest, affects
the knower... creates within the mind of the
learner informational networks, conceptual
connections, cognitive frameworks, and
expanded moral, intellectual and artistic
imagination. These aspects of the life of the
mind alter our ways of speaking, acting, and
responding to the world – and influence
what other knowledge we might choose to
‘look up’.” (p.77).