Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don't Know by Daniel R. Denicola (review)

In chapter 5 of Understanding Ignorance, Daniel DeNicola discusses an innovative class at the Arizona College of Medicine that seeks to map the shifting contours of medical ignorance, improve capacity for recognizing ignorance, and foster traits for best dealing with ignorance—curiosity, optimism, humility, skepticism. DeNicola applauds the cognitive and affective benefits of this approach. Highlighting ignorance can spur new lines of research, counteract the arrogance that often comes with medical authority, and encourage open-mindedness to new approaches. DeNicola believes that mapping ignorance can be valuable for all fields, not just medicine, and in Understanding Ignorance, he attempts to provide a map of ignorance itself. Epistemology is one field, of course, where such a higher-order map of ignorance has particular salience. DeNicola is clear, however, that his book is not a technical work of epistemology. Even so, criticisms of mainstream, analytic epistemology with its focus on Cartesian certainty sound throughout, and DeNicola's sympathies lie openly with un-Cartesian epistemological developments, especially virtue epistemology.

Chapter 7's discussion of pertinent ethical matters shows that ignorance can in fact be a good thing in cases where privacy or confidentiality, for instance, ought to be respected. On this basis, DeNicola argues in chapter 8 for recognition of new epistemic virtues, such as discretion, caution, and keeping one's counsel, as well as correlative vices, such as blabbing, nosiness, and propensity to offer "too much information." DeNicola might have made it clearer why these virtues and vices should be regarded as of epistemic rather than moral import, but the book is generally at its best when relating meditations on ignorance to current scholarship in virtue epistemology. Among the more philosophically engaging parts of the book is chapter 8's discussion of Julia Driver's provocative position on modesty and ignorance. According to Driver, modesty is a virtue requiring ignorance (of one's own worth), and this implies that practical wisdom (phronesis) is not required for all virtues (as typically thought), but can in fact be an impediment. DeNicola counters with a distinction between recognizing one's ignorance and being ignorant. He argues that while there are cases where a virtue requires the recognition of ignorance (humility is an example), he does not think any virtues require being ignorant. The chapter ends with an interesting critical discussion of Rancière's book on the advantages of ignorance in an educator. In addition to the eclecticism of DeNicola's scholarly engagements, these discussions illustrate his nuanced stance on ignorance's value: while not a virtue in itself, important virtues surround the recognition and understanding of ignorance.

For the most part, the rest of the book is not plugged in to a particular ongoing scholarly discussion in the way chapter 8 is engaged with current work in virtue epistemology. This is presumably deliberate and perhaps by necessity. In "mapping the geography of ignorance"—the book's stated goal—DeNicola takes himself to be charting a relatively new field of inquiry, where scholarship is still in a germinal stage. Taking the geographical metaphor seriously, DeNicola divides the book into sections treating ignorance as place, boundary, limit, and horizon, respectively. In charting this terrain, DeNicola covers wide swaths of ground, moving swiftly from discussions of public ignorance, privacy, and epistemic privilege to forays into quantum mechanics, actuarial science, and probability theory, among many other domains where ignorance is in one way or another a factor. The sheer range of topics covered in relatively short space gives the book the feel of a whirlwind tour. At times, it seems to be riffing on its theme, fitting in mention of Rawls's veil of ignorance alongside discussions of Plato's cave, the Garden of Eden, and Rumsfeld's famous taxonomy of epistemic states (unknown unknowns, and so on). (The riffing quality is not helped by epigraphs at the beginning of every part and chapter...