We started the semester in ignorance, we ended with confusion, and there was lots of distraction along the way. That was the overarching structure of my recent graduate seminar, Ignorance, Distraction, and Confusion.
The course surveyed epistemic value and the ethics of belief by studying various ways that thinking goes wrong. We began with a four-lesson crash course on foundational ideas in mainstream epistemology, which gave us tools and insights to apply throughout the course. We then examined varieties of not knowing, including ignorance stemming from false belief, epistemic vice, and doubt. In epistemology, ignorance is often treated as an uncommon and marginal aberration; we instead considered how ubiquitous, normal, and potent ignorance can be. We also looked at ways ignorance can be valuable.
We then turned to the normative contours of attention and distraction. We discussed forces of salience, ways that noticing and ignoring can be erroneous or harmful, and frameworks for evaluating attentional distributions. Assessing attention is increasingly important, as we drown in the informational flood of the internet age.
Finally we reached confusion, focusing on inapt concepts and conceptions. Suppose one person dubs Laurie an alcoholic and another—knowing the same facts—says Laurie is a non-addicted merrymaker. In some cases, the disagreement does not concern features of Laurie, but is instead about what qualifies as alcoholism. How should we adjudicate which conception is better?
Guests
We were thrilled to welcome seven expert guests during the course. Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC) discussed how people preserve ignorance, and the status quo, by maintaining unreasonably high standards. On Ichikawa’s view a doubt-monger might say “we don’t know what happened” about, for example, a rape accusation; and in many such cases they speak truly precisely because they unfairly ratchet up the evidential standards required for knowledge. This illustrates that for context-sensitive language, an assertion being true does not suffice for aptness. Perhaps the speaker should not have affected the conversational context in this way; they should have instead sustained a conversational context in which the context-sensitive utterance was false.
Anticipating themes in the Confusion segment, Ichikawa considered how to adjudicate amongst competing conceptions of what “woman” means. He argues that contextualism about “woman” means that in some conversational contexts the extension of “woman” depends on, say, genitalia whilst in others it depends on self-identification. He suggests language can be trans-exclusionary because it unnecessarily shifts the conversational contexts to ones in which counting as a “woman” depends on biological features, rather than on self-conception.
Catherine Elgin (Harvard) illuminated rational roles of emotion in shaping attention and highlighted the importance of salience for epistemology. Emotions help us appreciate which features are important and grasp explanatory connections that we might otherwise overlook. Emotions can also precipitate a shift in which systems of categorisations we employ. Irritation might cause us to reclassify charmless behaviour as unkind rather than merely clumsy, for example.
Bridging between distraction and confusion, Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers) described how a person’s perspective shapes what they notice and how they interpret and respond to their environment. An art critic is primed to notice and interpret a painting’s features differently from, say, a museum conservator. The critic might focus on how a Madonna’s hue differs from other paintings of the Madonna rather than, say, how that hue is affected by aging. Perspectives, which do not reduce to a set of propositional beliefs, are central to understanding thought. Mike Deigan (Rutgers) discussed the costs of concept possession and how understanding less—or quarantining that understanding—can be valuable. He argued that possessing a concept can, for instance, hinder our making sense of people who lack the concept.
Simone Weil was a wealthy woman who died from not eating. She described herself as unable to eat from moral conviction, owing to starvation caused by the German occupation of France. Biographers have since claimed she died from anorexia. Amy Flowerree’s (Texas Tech) research investigates who—or what—has the authority to characterise and interpret a person’s character and conduct in such cases.
Paulina Sliwa (Cambridge) posited a species of advice where, rather than addressing what a person should do, the advice giver instead introduces or applies a concept that illuminates the advisee’s situation. She provided examples of sexual harassment, rape, and intellectual theft. In each case, the new label helps the person understand their experience, and their own reaction to it, by suggesting a narrative structure or interpretive frame. The new conceptual resource also helps them communicate their experience to others.
We also workshopped two essays of mine. The first, “Attunement: On the Cognitive Virtues of Attention,” posits and investigates the virtues and vices of attention. I focus especially on social contexts, such as when patterns of disproportionate attention arise from a group distribution, rather than being a feature of any particular individual. Using examples from news media, I consider how attentional patterns can distort and mislead even when all the claims are true. And I argue that phenomena like political polarisation, for example, can arise from differences in emphasis and foregrounding, rather than always amounting to differences in evidence and belief.
The second essay, “Trauma’s Trilemma: On Self-Deception and Distraction about Unthinkable Truths,” explores self-deception in the wake of traumatic experiences. I focus on acquaintance rape victims who fail to realise that rape occurred, despite excellent evidence. Foregrounding victims’ diachronic agency, I explain how this can be an intelligible, and even rational, response to rape. Trauma can create a trilemma among emotional exhaustion, violating self-regard, and self-deception. These constitute prudential, moral, and epistemic horns of a trilemma, respectively, and the epistemic horn—not realising you were raped—can be the most reasonable route through the quagmire.
Finally, we ended with a one-session crash course on formal epistemology, delivered by guest expert Catherine Saint-Croix (Minnesota), and two sessions devoted to workshopping in-progress student essays.
Emerging Research
A unifying theme throughout the course is the ways that belief, assertion, or outlook can be true but wrong. One way to be confused, for example, is to centre thoughts on true but insignificant details. Such mistakes can be particularly pernicious because, compared to false beliefs, they can be hard to notice and remedy. A second recurring theme is application to society, especially political media, medical diagnoses, and sexual violence.
The course thus exhibits a double-applied structure: Firstly, insights from the crash course were applied to better understand the nature of ignorance, distraction, and confusion. Secondly, applying the topics to real-life examples helped us better understand both society and the epistemic pathologies themselves.
These topics are increasingly important. The epistemic power of attention, conceptual schemes, and interpretive frames has been largely overlooked by epistemology. But interest in these topics—especially attention—is growing. This is long overdue. Theorising ways that true information can mislead and distort is crucial for understanding the epistemic forces in society, especially in political epistemology. Epistemology that focuses on evidence, belief, and knowledge risks obscuring the nature, power, and extent of ignorance, distraction, and confusion.
Inspired by the course, my current project centres on terms like “love” whose meanings exhibit permissive flexibility. The term “love” can mean different things to different people, even when neither is wrong. Drawing on the power of attention and interpretation in shaping our own experiences, I describe how this flexibility in meaning underwrites maker’s knowledge about ourselves. A person’s own belief that she is in love, which is sensitive to how she interprets the term, influences her perspective, such that her own belief makes it true that she is in love. These feedback loops can create self-fulfilling sexual identities. I describe a species of linguistic luck in which luckily our interpretation of flexible terms enhances our flourishing. This in-progress essay is provisionally entitled “We Forge the Conditions of Love: Interpretation and Maker’s Knowledge at the Romantic Fringe.”
Were I to teach this course again, I would make at least two changes. Firstly, I would include Luvell Anderson’s excellent essay “Hermeneutical Impasses.” Secondly, I would avoid clustering visitors towards the end of the semester. Visitors were extremely valuable, but they constrained class time. Class participants would have preferred freedom during those final weeks to discuss topics and strategies for their final essays. And the density of guests in the final weeks reduced the time we spent wrapping up the course and reflecting on the semester’s journey.
Innovative Assignments I: Essay Bundle
The course included two assignments that might be worth highlighting. Firstly, the final assignment was an “essay bundle” rather than simply a standalone essay. The bundle includes:
(a.) essay (4,500–6,000 words)
(b.) essay handout (1-2 pages)
(c.) “weakness & opportunity” sheet identifying current limits & potential next steps to develop idea (approx. ½ page)
Distilling the thrust of an essay into a two-page handout is helpful for both the author and reader. I create handouts for my own essays and I would love the practice to catch on. (These essay handouts are on my website.) But, I confess, I don’t restrict myself to two pages.
The “weakness & opportunity” sheet is not graded. The assignment aims to help the students better understand their own project, including whether it is worth pursuing as, for example, a potential conference presentation, publication, or thesis topic, and whether they should deem their own ideas persuasive to others. Students can reflect on whether their essay provides a compelling argument for a small point, or has less persuasive force but a larger scope, for example. Perhaps the value of their essay is to reduce confusions or to provide a taxonomy. The “weakness & opportunity” sheet provides a chance to grasp the role of their essay within a landscape of scholarly research.
These meta-reflections on one’s own work are crucial for philosophical development. And their frank assessments help me guide the student when I provide feedback. I can better understand what limits and potential they grasp about their own essay. Even the very best essays have weaknesses. Understanding, situating, and learning from those limitations exhibits excellence.
Innovative Assignments II: Reading Responses
Students provided five reading responses to essays throughout the semester. They chose which essays they responded to. There are two kinds of reading response.
A. “Lock & Key” Reading Response: Provide two paragraphs. The first carefully articulates and explores something from the reading you could not understand. (That is, a lock.) The second explains an important but unobvious insight—a key—you gained from the reading. The key should not be a central claim of the reading. It should be an interesting new idea, such as an application or consequence of the ideas in the reading. Typically the lock and the key focus on unrelated aspects of the reading. Perhaps your key will open another reader’s lock.
B. “Question & Next Step” Reading Response: Provide two paragraphs. The first articulates a question for the author. The second supplies a next step, such as (i) how the author would, could, or should respond, (ii) a meta-comment about your question, such as what the dialectic indicates about the topic or a problem with your question, (iii) a distinct but connected follow-up question (perhaps it powerfully tightens your original objection, for example), or (iv) some other next step, such as how your question impacts other course topics or how to develop an essay idea from your question.
These reading responses were submitted before class, so they could steer class discussion. They pointed to aspects of the readings the students misunderstood, objected to, or found helpful. They also helped launch essay topics. Many “locks” were actually excellent objections, for example, which gives the students a running start on their final essays. (I found the “lock & key” idea online. I would like to credit the author, but sadly I cannot find the source.)
I developed the “question & next step” reading response because my own philosophical orientation includes that mere objections are somewhat overrated. A bare objection during a conference Q&A is less interesting than, for example, when the question-asker then attempts to respond to their own objection or highlights what the objection reveals about the topic. Objections are ubiquitous; every view faces objections. But the “next step” can yield or exhibit rare insight. My hope is for the “question & next step” reading response to convey these philosophical values to students.
And, as with the “weakness and opportunity” sheet above, having a philosophical thought can be less educative than having a meta-thought that helps situate the insight within one’s broader philosophical outlook. Perhaps the student developed a counterexample, for example. This is often an accomplishment. But many or most views have counterexamples, so identifying them is just one step in illuminating the target phenomena. A further set of questions asks whether and why this matters. This includes whether the counterexample reveals something important that we didn’t already know, whether the target view should be modified in response, and whether rival philosophical views are also impugned.
Auxiliary Guide
My course guides are always under three pages long. They only contain the necessities: Basic course structure, contact information, assignments, reading list, and other essential information. As a result, I have never been asked a question for which the answer was on the syllabus, nor had a student claim to misunderstand deadlines or other course requirements.
I accomplish this by providing an auxiliary guide, which supplements the main course guide. The auxiliary guide includes additional resources, advice, expectations, strategies for flourishing in the course, best practices for participating, details about grading, and other information. The central function of an auxiliary guide is to syphon content away from the course guide. It often exceeds eight pages. This dual-guide approach keeps the course guide brief and user-friendly, whilst allowing me to convey—through the auxiliary guide—all kinds of other helpful information. I recommend this dual-guide approach.
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Georgi Gardiner
Georgi Gardiner teaches at the University of Tennessee and is currently a fellow of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). She was previously the Andrew Fraser Junior Research Fellow at St. John's College, Oxford University. Her doctorate is from Rutgers University.
