IGNORANCE AND INQUIRY

Early Twentieth Century Productivity Growth Dynamics: an Inquiry into the Economic History of “our Ignorance”

On Ignorance and Contradiction

A critical view of the alleged significance of Belnap four-valued logic for reasoning under inconsistent and incomplete information is provided. The difficulty lies in the confusion between truth-values and information states, when reasoning about Boolean propositions. So our critique is along the lines of previous debates on the relevance of many-valued logics and especially of the extension o...

Ignorance and Imprecise Probabilities

Decisions or inferences sometimes have to made in situations where substantive information about aspects of the problem are either lacking or conflicting. This is often handled by constructing a non-informative prior by appealing to principles such as indifference, maximum entropy, invariance, or maximizing missing information. Unfortunately these priors and the resulting posteriors may depend ...

Ignorance and Indifference*

The epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique, ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of ind...

Circumscriptive Ignorance

In formal systems that reason about knowledge, inferring that an agent actually does not know a particular fact can be problematic. Collins [l] has shown that there are many different modes of reasoning that a subject can use to show that he is ignorant of something; some of these, for example, involve the subject reasoning about the limitations of his own information-gathering and memory abili...