In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 3 Ever Not Quite Unfinished Theories, Unfinished Societies, and Pragmatism Harvey Cormier Philosophers since Plato have worked to discover how it is that we know whatever it is we know. Western philosophy, ancient and modern, has taken on the task of finding out how we can look past the way things merely seem to the way they really are. Lately, however, a number of thinkers have argued that the question of how we can fail to know certain things, especially things with political consequences, is just as interesting and much more pressing. That question is often taken to go along with the question whether we, or at least some among us, are in fact responsible , and indeed culpable, for creating that very useful ignorance. It’s pretty clear that we live in a world unfortunately full of mendacious , propagandizing politicians and pernicious received “wisdom,” but in what follows I shall suggest that the prospects for an interesting and a socially beneficial epistemology of ignorance are not good. I do not think that there are deceptive phenomena and intellectual structures that we can penetrate with an improved philosophical perspective; or, at least, I think it won’t pay to think in those terms. The idea of phenomena and structures like these, generated by political realities and concealing those same realities, is perhaps not as ancient as the Western quest for certain knowledge, but it is not a new idea either, and it has had its critics for a while now. I shall call on the familiar criticisms of this idea, and I’ll try to suggest a better philosophical alternative than the effort to get past the appearances to the reality. 59 I Noam Chomsky, in his 1986 book Knowledge of Language, described two different but parallel problems that appear to confront anyone who reflects on human knowledge. One, “Plato’s problem,” is the problem of figuring out just how it happens that we human beings know as much as we do considering what W. V. Quine used to call “the poverty of the stimulus ,” or our tiny amount of experience of the world. Our scientific and historical knowledge is vast, and, when it comes to our knowledge of certain abstract formal principles, it seems literally infinite. A human life is a short and narrow thing, and our whole species is new to the earth in geological time. How have we come by so much knowledge, and how do we contain it all? Chomsky saw a connection between Plato’s problem and the issue of how it is that we human beings learn to produce an infinite variety of sentences, and he summed up the problem as that of determining “the innate endowment that serves to bridge the gap between experience and knowledge attained” (1986, xxv–xxvi). This is, indeed, one way of reconceiving the traditional task of epistemology that has been handed down from Plato. Chomsky thinks that his theory of innate grammatical structures contributes something to that task. The second problem, which Chomsky designated “Orwell’s problem ,” is that of understanding just how it is that we know as little as we do about our social and political situations given the overwhelming amount of information we have about them. Chomsky observed that George Orwell “was impressed with the ability of totalitarian systems to instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts about the world around us” (1986, xxvii). Neither Orwell nor Chomsky in the 1980s thought that the West had turned totalitarian just yet, but each thought that it could happen here, and each was concerned to identify ways in which Westerners were as vulnerable to state deception as the persons living under fascism and communism. Chomsky thought that Plato’s problem was the only profound or intellectually interesting one, but he also thought, in those days of cold war tensions, that broaching Orwell’s problem was critical to the survival of the human race. Chomsky argued that while Westerners were not liable to be dragged off to prison or for psychiatric treatment if they spoke out to challenge tenets of what he called the “state religion,” they were just as effectively silenced by the process that Walter Lippmann had described in 1921 as the “manufacture of consent.” In that manufacturing process, so-called “responsible” thinkers were brought to prominence by the powerful and the privileged, and only those thinkers were ever heard...

Share