Skip to main content

Truths that We Would Rather not Know

This post is by Kevin Lynch, currently a Research Fellow at University College Dublin (pictured above). His research focuses on understanding self-deception and similar phenomena, and also has research interests in psychoanalysis, issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and the philosophy of information. Here he summarises his recent paper 'Willful Ignorance and Self-Deception' published in Philosophical Studies.




What is willful ignorance? The following passage from the memoirs of the high-ranking Nazi Albert Speer is often quoted as a good illustration of it. Here Speer recounts an occasion where his trusted friend and colleague, Karl Hanke, after visiting a concentration camp (probably Auschwitz), reportedly advised him never to accept an invitation to inspect one under any circumstances.

'I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler, I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate – for I did not want to know what was happening there … During those few seconds, while Hanke was warning me, the whole responsibility had become a reality again … For from that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes. This deliberate blindness outweighs whatever good I may have done or tried to do in the last period of the war … Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense' (Speer 1971).

The suggestion here is that Speer was willfully ignorance of the fact that inmates were being exterminated in the concentration camps. This looks like an authentic example of willful ignorance, but what would a definition of it look like? In my paper I defend the following analysis of willful ignorance. A subject, S, is willfully ignorant that p (where ‘p’ stands for a proposition) if and only if:

1) p is true.

2) S has a warranted suspicion that p.

3) There are some actions, v, such that were S to do them, he would find out whether p, or there are some actions, u, such that were S not to do them, he would find out whether p, and S knows this.

4) Neither doing v nor not doing u would be exorbitantly demanding for S, and also, v and u are not instances of act types that it would be exorbitantly demanding for S to consistently do/not do.

5) S avoids ving, or S does u, because he does not want to know that p.

6) S should know that p, or it is arguable that he should.

The few philosophers who have discussed willful ignorance tend to assume that it is a kind of self-deception. I argue that willful ignorance and self-deception are distinct psychological kinds. I do this first by showing that none of the main theories of self-deception give any support to the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Furthermore, I give an argument that willful ignorance is not self-deception that is independent of these theories.

In brief, according to this argument if willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception, then it is a kind of deception. If it is a kind of deception, then it should display appropriate similarities to cases of ‘deception proper’, that is to say, cases of interpersonal deception or other-deception. Without such similarities, these could not help constitute a single kind, namely, deception. However, I try to show that there are no noteworthy similarities between willful ignorance and other-deception. Therefore, willful ignorance is not a kind of deception (hence it is not a kind of self-deception).

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...