Abstract
In the current philosophical and psychological literature, knowledge avoidance and willful ignorance seem to be almost identical conditions involved in irrational patterns of reasoning. In this paper, we will argue that not only these two phenomena should be distinguished, but that they also fall into different parts of the epistemic rationality-irrationality spectrum. We will adopt an epistemological and embodied perspective to propose a definition for both terms. Then, we will maintain that, while willful ignorance is involved in irrational patterns of reasoning and beliefs, knowledge avoidance should be considered epistemically rational under particular circumstances. We will begin our analysis by considering which of the two phenomena is involved in patterns of reasoning that are still amply recognized as irrational—as wishful thinking, self-deception, and akrasia. We will then discuss the impact of epistemic feelings—which are emotional events that depend on epistemic states—on agents' decision-making. Then, we will consider the impact of willful ignorance and knowledge avoidance on agents' autonomy. By considering these issues, we will argue that when agents are aware that they are avoiding certain information (and aware of what kind of feelings acquiring the information would trigger), knowledge avoidance should be considered a rational, autonomy-increasing, hope-depended selection of information.
Highlights
Various psychological studies have confirmed that there are different situations in which the majority of people would not want to know something to avoid pain, regret, or anxiety (Eil and Rao, 2011; Sicherman et al, 2016; Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero, 2017)
To fully explain this epistemic right to not-know, we have first distinguished between “willful ignorance” and “knowledge avoidance”: while the former amounts to all cases in which people try to preserve a general state of ignorance avoiding all circumstances that would allow them to stumble on particular knowledge by accident, the latter describes the agents’ avoidance of a particular piece of information, which could not fall in their laps otherwise
To defend the rationality of knowledge avoidance, we used takes from embodied cognition research and theories of bounded/ecological rationality (Goldstein and Gigerenzer, 2002; Bissoto, 2007; Spellman and Schnall, 2009; Xu et al, 2020)
Summary
Various psychological studies have confirmed that there are different situations in which the majority of people would not want to know something to avoid pain, regret, or anxiety (Eil and Rao, 2011; Sicherman et al, 2016; Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero, 2017). Spellman and Schnall (2009) argue, and we agree, that those ideal cognizers who make decisions without considering their context nor their bodily cues have nothing of the human traits that characterize our typical agents For this reason, bounded rationality today is variously rethought within the broader compass of embodied cognition research (Gallagher, 2018; Xu et al, 2020). To preserve a fair judgment (e.g., the double-blind peer-review process) (Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero, 2017) In all these cases, the agents avoid knowing a particular piece of information that may affect their judgment and reasoning. We will maintain that most of these forms of irrationality involve wishful ignorance but not knowledge avoidance
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