Ignorance Claims Research Articles

“Not a Shred of Evidence”: Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtle Indian Residential School

This article examines how the network of settler colonial systems in Canada worked to ensure the widespread and intentional cover-up that allowed one man to remain in the Indian Residential School (irs) system for over two decades (from 1910 to 1932) despite overwhelming evidence of his abuse. Using genocide scholar Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of settler colonial mesh as a framework, this article details the 1930 case against Birtle Indian Residential School Principal Henry B. Currie to understand the multiple strategies of concealment used to protect him. A multitude of actors and institutions were involved in the coverup: the Indian agent and the Department of Indian Affairs, the Presbyterian Church, the court systems, and the public press. Strategies of concealment included blatant bribery, transferring accused principals to other schools, document falsification, forced marriages, and misreporting runaways, along with the irs system itself, which kept children from their families and support systems. The article concludes with a discussion of settler claims of ignorance and the role archives play in revealing the truth about abusers within the irs system.

The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research

Background:Recent complex and cross-boundary policy problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, have recentred debates about state capacity, democratic discontent and the ‘crisis of expertise’. These problems are contested and open to redefinition, misunderstanding, spin, and deception, challenging the ability of policymakers to locate, discriminate, comprehend, and respond to competing sources of knowledge and expertise. We argue that ‘non-knowledge’ is an under-explored aspect of responses to major policy crises. Key points:While discussed in recent work in sociology and other social sciences, non-knowledge has been given less explicit attention in policy studies, and is not fully captured by orthodox understandings of knowledge and evidence use. We outline three main forms of non-knowledge that challenge public agencies: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation. In each case, ‘non-knowledge’ is not simply the absence of policy-relevant knowledge. Amnesia refers to what is forgotten, reinvented or ‘unlearned’, while claims of ignorance involve obscuring or casting aside of relevant knowledge that could (or even should) be available. To be misinformed is to actively believe false or misleading information. In each instance, non-knowledge may have strategic value for policy actors or aid the pursuit of self-interest. Conclusions and implications:We demonstrate the relevance of non-knowledge through a brief case study, emerging from the inquiry into the COVID-19 hotel quarantine programme in the Australian state of Victoria. We argue that both amnesia and ‘practical’ forms of ignorance contributed to failures during the early part of the programme.

Samuel Beckett's "Philosophy Notes." ed. by Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman

Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett's "Philosophy Notes." ed. by Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman Marc Farrant Samuel Beckett's "Philosophy Notes." Ed. Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 576. $125.00 (cloth). Samuel Beckett's "Philosophy Notes" comprises the Irish writer's (largely) complete notes on the history of Western philosophy, an autodidactic enterprise undertaken in the 1930s alongside—and between—the publication of his first forays in fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938). First discovered in a trunk in his cellar after his death in 1989, and hitherto unavailable to a general academic audience, this Oxford University Press edition of the notes consists of the full text of two manuscripts held at Trinity College Dublin, consisting of some 267 folios totalling over 110,000 words. The moniker "Philosophy Notes" derives from a prior publication of the volume's coeditor, Matthew Feldman's Beckett's Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett's 'Interwar Notes' (2006)—a seminal publication of the archival turn in Beckett Studies. Feldman and his coeditor, Steven Matthews, do an excellent job of framing the material that is included here (which runs to over five hundred pages), suggesting ways for the reader to navigate Beckett's compendious research into what he referred to once as the "loutishness of learning."1 Indeed, this volume's introduction is exceptionally useful. Building on Feldman's prior work in this area, the introduction consolidates a narrative of Beckett's engagement with philosophy [End Page 598] that helps crystallize several significant hermeneutic focal points. Feldman lays out Beckett's engagement with philosophy in several works that argue that the "direct relationship between 'Beckett and philosophy'—meaning Samuel Beckett's struggle with Western philosophy as it influenced his poetics and outlook—lasted only a decade, from 1928 to 1938."2 Based on the extant archival notes themselves, Feldman's thesis is convincing and is further compounded by the publication of Beckett/Philosophy—a 2015 essay collection that might be considered a companion to this Oxford University Press edition of the notes (chapters are cited repeatedly in the editors' introduction). What follows from this narrative is a twofold skepticism towards both Beckett's own claims of ignorance regarding Western philosophy—"I never read philosophers"—and theoretical or philosophically inspired readings of Beckett's works.3 For Feldman, these readings all too often repeat their axiomatic premises at the expense of the works themselves. An implicit claim here is that a "work" of literature points more in the direction of its origin (its author; its archival beginnings) than its destination, the countersignature of the critic or reader. In other words, for Feldman's empiricist approach, the question of the philosophical meaning of Beckett's works is separate from the question of Beckett and philosophy (Feldman, "Beckett and Philosophy, 1928–1938," 167). This Oxford University Press edition follows Feldman's empiricist lead. This is amplified by the fact that the notes themselves, as the editors remark, consist of "a kind of edited version from parts of three major source texts" that Beckett largely copied verbatim, with a minimum of interventional commentary or "authorship" (Matthews and Feldman, xxv, xl). Thus, although the notes offer little to help form an idea of Beckett as philosopher, as a documentary record of his engagement with the philosophical tradition they do help categorically to refute the idea that he was writing from a position of ignorance with regard to the major ideas and debates that had preoccupied philosophers from the pre-Socratics to Friedrich Nietzsche (where the notes abruptly end). As a work of scholarship, too, the Philosophy Notes are a remarkable achievement. The footnotes that run throughout track every reference to Beckett's published works, allowing the reader to shuttle back and forth with ease. The introduction is also, on its own, a significant resource. Therein the editors extensively detail and date (where possible) Beckett's note-taking practice, developed alongside his period spent with James Joyce working on Finnegans Wake. The specific philosophy notes included in this volume were begun in 1932 in London (although they contain no internal dating). The first major...

How food companies use social media to influence policy debates: a framework of Australian ultra-processed food industry Twitter data.

To understand if, and how, Australian ultra-processed food industry actors use Twitter to influence food and health policy debates and produce a conceptual framework to describe such influence. Twitter data of prominent industry actors were defined through purposive sampling and inductively coded to investigate possible influence on food and health policy debates. These are described using descriptive statistics and coded extracts. Australia. Twitter accounts of nine prominent ultra-processed food industry actors, including major trade associations. Ultra-processed food industry actors actively used Twitter to influence food and health policy debates. Seven overarching strategies were identified: co-opting public health narratives; opposing regulation; supporting voluntary, co- or self-regulation; engaging policy processes and decision-makers; linking regulatory environments to the need for ongoing profitability; affecting public perceptions and value judgements; and using ignorance claims to distort policy narratives. Each lobbying strategy is underpinned with tactics described throughout and captured in a framework. The current study creates a framework to monitor how food industry actors can use social media to influence food and health policy debates. As such, social media appears to be not only an important commercial determinant of health for brand marketing, but also an extension of lobbying practices to reshape public perceptions of corporate conduct and policy-making.

Textual Keys to Understand Socrates' Profession of Ignorance in the Apology (21a-23c)

In the present paper I analyze some relevant textual keys of Plato's Apology (21a-23c) to show the many strands underlying Socrates' claims of ignorance. I advocate a position that seeks to reevaluate the use of epistemic lexica by considering other evidence, such as cultural and dramatic context, the use of hypothetical clauses, the comparative and the rhetoric of the pair real/apparent. From this approach, I hope to show that there are good reasons to interpret Socrates' claims of ignorance in the light of amiable irony, whereby the use of language and other literary devices create layers of meaning to express the full sense of Socratic wisdom for the audience without resorting to the charge of contradiction or insincerity. Against a position that reduces Socrates' message to the use of epistemic lexica to interpret it either by synonymy, equivocity or low/high cognitive grading, I propose to read Socrates' claims of ignorance, always in comparison to others' claim of wisdom, as a sort of cultural appropriation and revaluation of the traditional title σοφία/σοφός.

“Who is responsible about our lives?”: “Failing” governance and mobilizations in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut

ABSTRACT This article situates modes of politicization based on the unclarity of camp governance in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut. After the Lebanese Civil War, the intervention of a growing number of actors in the camps, from international organizations to local networks of self-help, makes the governance structure of the camps hard-to-read, leading to regular complaints from camp residents about a failing or inexistent governance system in the camps. From a perspective drawing on literature on hybrid political orders, social movements, and informal institutions in urban governance, this article explains how camp dwellers in fact possess clear knowledge about the camps’ governance system, and mostly use claims of ignorance as a way to safely denounce specific authorities. The denunciation of a “failing” system of governance thus provides local activists with resources allowing them to label and challenge authority in creative manners.

The Ethicality of the Demand for (Trans)parency in Sexual Relations

This article considers what we owe to each other by way of information disclosure prior to sexual intimacy. It does so in one specific context, namely sexual relations between cisgender and transgender people. In recent years, the UK has witnessed a spate of sexual offence prosecutions brought against young transgender and other gender non-conforming people. The article does not deal with questions of criminal law, at least not directly. Rather, it aims to challenge the dominant cisnormative view that non-disclosure of (trans)gender history is unethical. The article contains four parts. First, it will issue an important caveat concerning complainant claims of ignorance of defendant gender identity. This is important because without the caveat, the analysis might be viewed as reinforcing the transgender/deception coupling. Second, the article will delineate the relevant ‘facts’ about gender in relation to which ethical conclusions might appropriately be drawn. This section will highlight how problematisation of (trans)gender identity is an effect of cisnormative power and privilege. Third, the article engages with arguments derived from normative ethics, ones which accept gender identity claims, at least nominally, but nevertheless view non-disclosure of gender history to be unethical. It will do so in order to highlight how, even when issues of ideology, power and privilege are ignored or suspended, the view that an ethical obligation to disclose ought to exist will not necessarily win the day. Finally, the article returns to issues of cisnormative power and privilege and considers what it might mean to be ‘ethically gendered,’ and the implications of being so for the way we think and feel about sexual encounters in a world characterised by gender variance.

States of ignorance: the unmaking and remaking of death tolls

This paper considers the complications and tensions associated with knowing about ignorance. In particular it attends to how the social analysis of ignorance hazards being associated with the production and magnification of ignorance. It does so through questioning how the UK government contended that the number of civilian deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion could not ‘reliably’ be known. The twists and turns of official public statements are interpreted against the back region government and civil service deliberations obtained under the British Freedom of Information Act. Far from settling what took place, however, this material compounded the challenge of trying to characterize different strategies for manufacturing ignorance. From an examination of the choices, contingencies and challenges in the way actors and social scientists depict ignorance, this paper then considers future possibilities for inquiry whereby social analysts can question their role in producing ignorance while questioning claims of ignorance.

FROM IRONY TO ENIGMA: DISCOVERING DOUBLE IGNORANCE AND SOCRATES’ DIVINE KNOWLEDGE

To dismiss the problems of Socratic moral intellectualism as well as Socratic irony (with respect to his claims of ignorance) in the following we shall first discuss how there are different forms of not-knowing in the Platonic dialogues. By referencing various passages throughout Plato’s entire corpus we shall see that like his nuanced understanding of knowledge, Plato also delineated between kinds of ignorance with only one denying virtue and the good life to individuals. This will prove that Socrates does not associate with a reprehensible state when he claims ignorance and thus there is no need to appeal to irony when he makes such avowals of not-knowing. In the second half of this essay I will also suggest that the knowledge to which Socrates appeals is not an “ironic” appeal to human knowledge, as various scholars have argued, but is a sincere appeal to divine knowledge, i.e. immediate wisdom, which all human beings possess and rely on in their daily lives. In other words, Socratic knowing is a kind of enigmatic knowing which must be understood as a pre-theoretical, unexamined or innate wisdom. For Socrates all individuals “possess” such wisdom but in order to do the work that is “properly” human, i.e. the work allowing for virtue, one must enigmatically marry this “knowledge” with recognized ignorance.

Why did Kant reject physiological explanations in his anthropology?

One of Kant’s central tenets concerning the human sciences is the claim that one need not, and should not, use a physiological vocabulary if one studies human cognitions, feelings, desires, and actions from the point of view of his ‘pragmatic’ anthropology. The claim is well known, but the arguments Kant advances for it have not been closely discussed. I argue against misguided interpretations of the claim, and I present his actual reasons in favor of it. Contemporary critics of a ‘physiological anthropology’ reject physiological explanations of mental states as more or less epistemologically dubious. Kant does not favor such ignorance claims—and this is for the good, since none of these claims was sufficiently justified at that time. Instead, he develops an original irrelevance thesis concerning the empirical knowledge of the physiological basis of the mind. His arguments for this claim derive from his original and, up to now, little understood criticism of a certain conception of pragmatic history, related to his anthropological insights concerning our ability to create new rules of action, the social dynamics of human action, and the relative inconstancy of human nature. The irrelevance thesis also changes his views of the goal and methodology of anthropology. Kant thereby argues for a distinctive approach in quest for a general ‘science of man’.

On Drawing Attention to Ignorance

In the years since a symposium on science and ignorance at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a small but growing number of scholars has begun to study scientific ignorance. This essay offers informal descriptions of three major projects on the social construction of ignorance and raises the possibility for the development of a sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) to complement the existing sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). As currently conceptualized, SSI would draw attention to a wide range of phenomena in scientific discourse and practice; these include a rich assortment of ignorance claims, and ignorance arrangements, social arrangements that work to deprive people of scientific knowledge. For SSI to develop its full potential will require scholars to overcome ignorance of existing scholarship and resistance within both science and science studies to ignorance as an organizing idea. The benefits, if scholars can do these things, may be many.

Constructing and Reconstructing Scientific Ignorance

In Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms, Australian sociologist Michael Smithson observes that Western intellectuals, who once preoccupied themselves with knowledge, are increasingly pondering ignorance. Those who are not, he adds, should consider doing so. It is an arresting suggestion, not unlike the one art instructors often make to students of drawing: do not look at the figure; look at the space around the figure. Once attention is focused on ignorance rather than on knowledge, one begins to see that ignorance is not the simple absence of knowledge. Instead, like the space around objects, ignorance has its own configurations. It varies in amount, form, and substance, depending on the perspective. And just as artists make use of the representational power of space, scientists and nonscientists alike often manipulate ignorance, maximizing or minimizing it in ways that affect the credibility of what we know. In developing this argument, the article draws on the insights of historians, philosophers, mass communications and legal scholars, discourse analysts, and sociologists of science to examine scientists' use of ignorance claims in the construction of science and in science for public policy. It also looks at how nonscientists sometimes appropriate and attempt to manipulate such claims, often through the news media. Such uses, the article argues, reflect and serve claimants' interests. The news media, in turn, appropriate and emphasize those ignorance claims that advance and protect their own particular concerns.