Episode 32: Jennifer Lockhart discusses ignorant knowledge
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What is “ignorant knowledge” and why did Jennifer Lockhart coin the term?
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykman, and with me today is Jennifer Lockhart, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, and a recent graduate of the philosophy program here at the University of Chicago. And she is here to talk with us about ignorant knowledge. Jennifer Lockhart, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
So ignorant knowledge is a paradoxical sounding uh term that you coined to express a certain kind of failure to do something. So maybe you can tell us a bit, you know, what do you mean by ignorant knowledge?
Okay, so someone in a state of ignorant knowledge, there are three important things about him. The first is that he is living as if he were ignorant of some truth about how he ought to live. And so this is why he's called an ignorant knower. He's as if he were ignorant. There's something that he seems not to know. But then the second feature of the ignorant knower is that he purports to know this truth. So if you try to tell him what it is that he seems to be ignorant of, he says, Oh yeah, I know and he will agree with you and he's he's willing to repeat it and he might even be quite enthusiastic about whatever it is that he seems to be ignorant of. And then the third feature of him is that he's unaware of this practical disconnect between what it is that he seems to be ignorant of and he's not aware of the disconnect between
his own behavior and what it is that he takes himself to know. And so that's why he's called an ignorant knower, because he's someone who seems on the one hand very much to know, but on the other hand goes on living as if he were ignorant, so you kinda wanna tell him what it is that he seems not to know.
Yeah, so it's something like it's someone who professed to know everything they needed to know about how to be polite. You know, oh in order to be polite you need to make eye contact and you need to listen to what the other person says very carefully and take them seriously. But then when you actually observe this person in practice and they're actually at a party talking to people, it becomes clear that they don't actually know how to implement any of these things that they should do in principle.
Yeah, and I think it would become sort of a paradigm case of Kierkegaard ignorant knowledge. I I hadn't thought of this case, but if you imagine the person at the party kind of expounding how it is that one ought to be polite in a way that is quite rude without making eye contact and being kind of disruptive and loud and yeah, that would be a case of ignorant knowledge. And so as he goes around knowing and seeming to know all of these rules about what is polite and impolite, putting on display the fact that he doesn't seem to know how to be polite. And it's important that he's not aware of this disconnect. You could also imagine a case where the person is describing what's required to be polite and just takes himself to be quite a rude person anyway and doesn't care about it.
Um but so this for it to be a case of ignorant knowledge, he's gotta be unaware of this disconnect.
Right. So it's not like a soccer coach who is really good at teaching people to play soccer but can't themselves play soccer. It's crucial to this idea of the ignorant knower that they be unaware that they can't put their theoretical knowledge into practice.
Exactly.
What might be another example of an ignorant knower?
So another example of an ignorant knower that I've tried to develop is by kind drawing out a scenario that arises in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. And so Aristotle is discussing someone who listens to talk about virtue but doesn't put it into practice. And he says that this is like someone who's sick and who goes to the doctor and tries to find out what to do but never actually does what the doctor
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