This is a post by Oscar Piedrahita (University of Barcelona).
You’re mowing your lawn when your neighbor strolls over and asks, “Do you know how many blades of grass you’ve just cut?” You’d naturally answer no. But if they then say “So you’re ignorant of that fact?”, this second question would feel stilted, perhaps even misplaced. Is this something you’re supposed to know? Of course you don’t know the count, but calling you ignorant of that trivial detail sounds like an unwarranted criticism.
This simple example reveals something important for a philosophical account of ignorance: ignorance might be more than just a lack of knowledge or true belief. When we ascribe ignorance to someone, we seem to be doing something more than just noting a gap in their knowledge. We appear to be making some kind of appraisal. But what exactly is that appraisal about?
One influential recent proposal—put forward by philosophers Duncan Pritchard and Anne Meylan—holds that when we call someone ignorant, we mean they should have known something. On their view, ignorance always carries a rebuke: it implies that the person has, in some sense, failed as a knower.
According to this “Normative View,” you count as ignorant of a fact (say, the grass count) only if your lack of knowledge reflects some fault in your role as an inquirer. This is a role we often occupy and whose norms we should follow whenever we set out to find out how things are. Here’s one such norm: don’t clutter your mind with trivialities. This means that, as an inquirer, you’re doing just fine when you cut but don’t count the grass. If the fact you don’t know is trivial, you can’t really be said to fail to know it. You simply don’t know it, and you’re not ignorant of it either.
Although the Normative View explains why it sounds strange to call someone ignorant when no fault is involved, it ends up creating more trouble than it resolves. The difficulties come in three forms. First, it pushes us toward sweeping generalizations about what counts as ignorance. Second, it leaves out obvious cases where someone can be ignorant yet blameless. And third, it muddies an important line between being wrong without fault and being at fault. For these reasons, the view can’t stand as it is and we need a different way to make sense of the initial puzzle (I develop these points, along with an alternative account of ignorance, here and here).
Consider the grass-blade scenario again, but with a twist. Suppose you need money and your billionaire neighbor offers you a fortune if you count every blade on your lawn. Suddenly, that once-trivial fact becomes worth knowing, for surely one’s role as an inquirer and the things one should set out to find out should be responsive to one’s practical needs. If you still don’t count them, the Normative View would have us say that you should know the number, so your refusal counts as ignorance. On this view, you’ve somehow ended up ignorant of the grass count just because external circumstances made the inquiry worthwhile.
But that feels wrong. Your epistemic situation hasn’t changed at all; only the stakes have. It gets stranger still if a second billionaire offers you even more money not to count the grass. Would this erase your ignorance by making the inquiry no longer worthwhile? That consequence follows from the Normative View’s logic. But this would make ignorance hinge on factors that have nothing to do with whether your beliefs and evidence stand in the right relation to the facts; in other words, unrelated to anything epistemic, to anything that has to do with truth.
Now consider a more serious case. A climate researcher is working to discover new clean energy sources. She realizes her research could put her life in danger, so she rationally decides to stop. No one would blame her for protecting herself, even if it means she never learns the answer. By the lights of the Normative View, she would no longer count as ignorant of clean energy solutions, since she’s no longer expected to know them. Intuitively, though, that’s wrong. The danger changes her priorities, not her epistemic situation. The facts remain beyond her reach either way.
Then there’s another kind of case: when the sensible thing to do is to stay neutral. Sometimes a good inquirer should hold off taking sides when the evidence just isn’t strong enough. Imagine a scientist examining conflicting data about a new particle. The evidence is genuinely ambiguous, so they withhold belief. They don’t believe the particle exists, but they’re doing exactly what a good inquirer should. Still, if the particle does exist, there’s a clear sense in which they’re ignorant of that fact. Not at fault to be so, but ignorant nonetheless. The Normative View can’t accommodate this: if there’s no failure, then there’s no ignorance.
Finally, the Normative View collapses a distinction worth preserving between blameless and blameworthy ignorance. We regularly acknowledge that people can be ignorant through no fault of their own: because of misinformation, limited access to knowledge, or sheer bad luck. In our moral and epistemic practices, this matters: blameless ignorance can excuse. Think of a diligent doctor who misdiagnoses a patient because the symptoms were misleading. Her ignorance is real, but it isn’t blameworthy. The Normative View would treat all ignorance as failure, but cases like this show we must allow ignorance without fault.
These examples show that ignorance is not a failure of inquiry. The Normative View was motivated by the intuition that calling someone “ignorant” feels critical, but it achieves this by adding a condition to ignorance that makes problematic predictions. We need a different perspective: one that explains why calling someone ignorant can sound like an appraisal, without these odd results.
The alternative I proposed is to see ignorance as a non-normative epistemic evaluation. In this view, ignorance isn’t about fault or failure, but about a missing connection between the mind and the world. This can still use it to evaluate others, but what’s being judged is whether their way of thinking properly links up with the facts.
In simpler terms, ignorance isn’t just the absence of knowledge. It’s the absence of an explanatory connection between a fact and what someone believes (or fails to believe). For example, imagine a patient who comes to (correctly) believe she has a brain tumor, but she got that belief through a completely unrelated cue (perhaps a random headache). By pure coincidence the tumor exists, but it played no role in her belief. That gap—the missing link between facts and cognition—is what ignorance tracks.
This proposal handles the lawn case. You’re ignorant of the number of blades of grass because there’s no explanatory connection between that fact and your mind: you never counted them, never gathered evidence, never formed a belief tied to reality in that way. When we call someone ignorant, we’re noticing that their epistemic state fails to track the relevant facts. This is a common feature of the previous examples: a lack of connection between their minds and the facts that matter.
This also clarifies why calling someone ignorant of a pointless fact feels odd. Pointless facts rarely invite epistemic appraisal; there’s simply no reason to check whether our beliefs connect to them. It’s not that we aren’t ignorant of pointless facts; instead, there’s usually no point in evaluating whether our epistemic states are properly connected to them.
Even in the billionaire’s version of the grass-counting story, your ignorance remains the same. You still lack any connection between your mind and the number of blades, regardless of the practical stakes. What changes isn’t your epistemic situation, but the relevance of pointing it out.
So, in the end, the inclination to think of ignorance as more than simply a lack of knowledge is well-founded: calling someone “ignorant” does appraise their epistemic state. But the Normative View goes too far by tying that appraisal to fault. By contrast, seeing ignorance as an epistemic evaluation—one that highlights the absence of a connection between our minds and certain facts— lets us keep the evaluative sense of the word without treating ignorance as a failure.
This shift gives us a more charitable and realistic picture of our epistemic lives. We can admit that ignorance pervades inquiry without treating every gap in knowledge as a failure. More importantly, it lets us focus on what truly matters: not eradicating ignorance, which is impossible, but understanding when and why it ultimately matters.
To read more, see my paper ‘Pointless facts and the normativity of ignorance’, Philosophical Studies 182, 2905–2924 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-025-02386-w
Oscar Piedrahita is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona, where he explores different forms of not knowing and why they matter.
Open Philosophy 