'We Must Examine and Fix What Ignorance Is'

A thoughtful, well-read reader has taught me a new and useful word: agnoiology. It’s a straight borrow from the Greek word for “ignorance” and means, according to the OED, “the study of the nature of ignorance or of what it is impossible to know.” It entered English in 1854, coined by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64). In the Age of AI it seems important to know this word, which first appears in Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysics: 

“We must examine and fix what ignorance is—what we are, and can be, ignorant of. And thus we are thrown upon an entirely new research, constituting an intermediate section of philosophy, which we term the agnoiology or theory of ignorance.”

 

Colloquially, people call others “ignorant” when they disagree with them or find them unsophisticated. It’s a handy word in the arsenal of snobbery. More formally, ignorance is the absence of knowledge. I am ignorant of the rules governing football and irregular French verbs. In theory, I could learn both bodies of knowledge but have no desire to do so. I’m content with my ignorance. Ferrier distinguishes the “unknowable” from the “unknown.”

 

In her 1899 monograph on Ferrier, published in the “Famous Scots Series,” Elizabeth Haldane quotes the philosopher stressing “the use, indeed the absolute necessity, of a true doctrine of ignorance.” Haldane writes:

 

“There are, Ferrier says, two sorts of so-called ignorance: one of these is incidental to some minds, but not to all—an ignorance of defect, he puts it — just as we might be said to be ignorant of a language we had never learned. But the other ignorance (not, properly speaking, ignorance at all) is incident to all intelligence by its very nature, and is no defect or imperfection. The law of ignorance hence is that ‘we can be ignorant only of what can be known,’ or ‘the knowable is alone the ignorable.’”

 

If I understand Ferrier’s epistemology correctly, ignorance ought to be an inducement to humility. Not only is there much we don’t know, but even more we can’t know. Listen to commonplace conversations and notice how often people make categorial statements concerning things they know nothing about. We all do it on occasion. Some make a career of it. Ignorance, in the conventional sense, is a goad to learning. Remember Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision” in Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1983):

 

“ignorance about those who have disappeared

undermines the reality of the world”