Pragmatism and Ignorance

Pragmatists have typically been more concerned with positive epistemic states (knowledge, warranted assertibility, etc.) than with the negative state of ignorance. Atkins, however, looks both to Charles Peirce and to C. I. Lewis in order to gain new insights into ignorance itself, into the conditions that keep us ignorant, and into the ways in which ignorance can be valuable. Atkins draws on Peirce’s account of our doxastic machinery – including how beliefs are formed and the various ways they become “fixed” – to formulate lessons about the kinds of information environments that can keep believers “mired in ignorance” and the virtues we should cultivate in order not to succumb to the forces that would keep us ignorant. Making use of Peirce’s and Lewis’s ideas about the good and the right, Atkins also maintains that ignorance is sometimes preferable to knowledge – in some circumstances, ignorance is instrumentally good and the right thing to do is to see that it be maintained.