Ignorance in the Epistemic Practices

The Standpoints of Virtue Epistemology and Feminist Philosophy and Methodology of Science

Abstract

The issue of ignorance from the standpoint of virtue epistemology and feminist science methodology is the focus of the following article. Both research traditions, established as reactions to the crisis of the positivist approach, create new normative criteria for credibility and objectivity of knowledge. Analyzing the contents and practices of ignorance becomes essential to the process. Both traditions are set to scrutinize ignorance's nature and functioning mechanisms in a broad social context in general and science in particular. In virtue epistemology, ignorance could give credence to unbiased epistemic activity, serving as a virtue in this case. At the same time, ignorance, imposed on personal traits of the epistemic agent, expressed as modesty and caution, potentially turns a virtue into an intellectual vice. Ignorance, expressed by an epistemic agent, could share similarities in scientific and political practices. Following this assumption, the rational, irrational, and inadvertent versions of ignorance, suggested by J. Freidman, are described and analyzed in the given article. There is an independent project of the epistemology of ignorance, which has been developed in the course of feminist philosophy and methodology of science. The latter criticized the notion of the universal scientific method, which has had a dominant position in science for centuries. It is seen as a mediator of epistemic injustice directly related to the production and reproduction of ignorance. Here ignorance acts as an instrument that shapes scientific and political reality, intervening with each other and embodied in the institute of expertise. The expressed alternative is the standpoint theory (S. Harding) with its more just and efficient methodology. Revision of the existing methodological basis allows a non-conventional look at the issue of normativity, reliability of knowledge, and trust (trustworthiness) of epistemic agents in epistemic activities, along with the creation of a viable project of collective epistemology.