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Books

Understanding Ignorance by Daniel R. DeNicola

Paul McGavin finds help in understanding ignorance in Understanding Ignorance.

This is an important and impressive book that deserves our attention. Although it’s not a perfect book, its author, a professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, displays deep thought and wide reading, and traverses a broad canvas in understanding ignorance. On the whole the writing is accessible to patient general readers, and DeNicola carefully introduces them to the technical language of the theory of knowledge (or ‘epistemology’, as it is known in the business).

He considers Ignorance under three categories:

(1) Known unknowns – what I know I don’t know;

(2) Unknown unknowns – what I don’t know I don’t know; and

(3) Unknown knowns – what I don’t know I know; for example tacit knowledge, or what I have forgotten before being reminded.

The many variations of these categories are analysed in an accessible way.

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