Abstract

Pointless and unknowable facts suggest that ignorance is more than a mere lack of knowledge or true belief, because ascribing ignorance seems to involve an implicit negative assessment that doesn’t carry over to our ascriptions of agents simply lacking knowledge or true belief. But what exactly is ignorance, aside from a lack of knowledge or true belief? It is tempting to answer by adding a normative condition to ignorance. Accordingly, some authors (Pritchard, 2021ab; Meylan, 2020, 2024) have recently argued that someone is ignorant of a fact only if her not knowing or not truly believing that fact manifests some failure of inquiry. It is shown here that incorporating a normative condition like this into a theory of ignorance leads to problematic generalizations, is at odds with ignorance in cases of faultless suspension, and blurs the widely accepted distinction between blameless and blameworthy ignorance. It is further argued that any non-normative view that conceives ascriptions of ignorance as a form of epistemic evaluation that tracks an explanatory connection between a subject’s epistemic state and a fact avoids these problems. The paper provides a more nuanced picture of how non-normative views of ignorance can capture ignorance’s evaluative aspects.