Epistemic and Practical Ignorance in Cultural Projects. A Vice-Theoretic Account

Epistemic practices such as decision-making, revision of beliefs, and problem-solving are at the centre of the life of an organisation. They are enacted at different levels of the organisations, from work-teams to the board of directors. These practices are performed to manage and distribute the knowledge produced within the organisation. Some virtue epistemologists have recently approached knowledge management in organisation from a virtue theoretical account (de Bruin 2013), quite often with a key-reference to the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (Costello 2019). Some epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage, temperance, and generosity have been investigated as crucial for the positive and constructive management of knowledge within the organisation, and as instrumentally valuable in the realisation of business ends. But the real-life of an organisation is not just made of virtues. Epistemic vices are spread in many segments of the knowledge management process. Epistemic vices such as closed- mindedness, negligence, and insouciance are cognitive defects that impede effective and responsible epistemic practices. Epistemic vices are usually conceptualised as character traits and thus, as the individual epistemic agent's styles of thought (Cassam 2016). For instance, prejudice as giving credit where it isn’t due, and failing to give it where it is due, impedes serious inquiry. As a consequence, it results to be a deceiving way of thinking. Baird and Calvard (2019) have proficiently described epistemic vices in terms of the agent’s motivation, thus binding epistemic vices to a responsabilist account of knowledge (Code 1987, Zagzbeski 1996). This means that, for example, having a bad sight is not an epistemic vice, but caring for just comfort beliefs and not seeking the truth about a topic is an epistemic vice towards which the agent is at least partially responsible. In this paper, we consider “ignorance” as a prominent case of epistemic vice in organisations. We consider a wilful form of ignorance as “epistemic ignorance”.1 Epistemic ignorance is the disinterest in searching for the truth and the consequent intentional lack of knowledge.2 Epistemic ignorance is different from the mere absence of knowledge because it implies the intentional epistemic posture of not caring for the truth. This means that an epistemic ignorant agent would deliberately ignore the value of the episteme and the processes that can bring her to the truth. We argue that we need to shed light on this kind of wilful ignorance because it discloses some problematic features of knowledge management in organisations, especially in its social and political dimension. Therefore, focusing on epistemic ignorance allows appreciating how vices are produced, cultivated, and actively strengthened by various social mechanisms (Tanesini 2016). Finally, epistemic ignorance results in being embedded in knowledge management and can thus be profitably defined as “structural epistemic ignorance”.3 We claim that this type of ignorance must be attributed not only to individuals but also to epistemic cultures, namely the “epistemic ignorance culture”. One such epistemically vicious culture can be found in societies that, for instance, allow people to acquire the ‘privilege not to know’ about the misery of others, their ignorance shielding them from all sorts of structural and interpersonal injustices (Sullivan and Tuana 2007). Epistemic ignorance is thus strictly linked to epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and the hybristic culture of autoreferentiality (Medina 2013). A prominent case of ignorance as a complex social phenomenon is white privilege, partially anchored in a lack of knowledge, a lack of interest, or deliberately chosen ignorance about the exploitation suffered by Native Americans and Atlantic slaves under European colonialism. It is also crucial to see how a culture scaffolds individual orientation, as in a bullshitter epistemic culture (echoing Frankfurt 2005) where agents become gullible, willingly or not. This culture makes them trust whatever information propagated by their preferred source of information and therefore the agents are incapable of distinguishing trustworthy and untrustworthy information.