We know a lot about what the world is like. We know less, it seems, about what we know about what the world is like. According to a common thought, it is easier for us to come to know about the state of the world than to come to know about the state of our own knowledge. What explains this gap? An attractively simple hypothesis is that our ignorance about what we know is explained by our ignorance about the world. There are things we fail to know about what we know about the world because there are things we fail to know about the world. This hypothesis is often motivated by the idea that knowledge requires a margin‐for‐error. In this paper, I'll argue that this simple hypothesis is inadequate. Not all our ignorance of our knowledge can be explained by our ignorance about the world. In this sense, at least some of our ignorance about what we know is brute.

中文翻译：

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 野蛮的无知


我们对世界了解很多。看来，我们对世界的了解似乎更少。根据普遍的想法，我们了解世界的状况比了解我们自己的知识的状况更容易。如何解释这一差距？一个有吸引力的简单假设是，我们对自己所知的无知是由我们对世界的无知来解释的。对于我们对世界的了解，有些事情我们无法了解，因为我们对世界有些事情无法了解。这一假设通常是由这样的想法引发的：知识需要有误差范围。在本文中，我将论证这个简单的假设是不够的。我们对知识的无知并不能全部用我们对世界的无知来解释。从这个意义上说，我们对已知事物的无知至少有一些是野蛮的。