Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the epistemology of ignorance, it is often assumed that ignorance is best investigated by examining how the expression "to be ignorant" is used. This contrasts with many non-English languages, which lack a direct equivalent and instead express ignorance as the absence of knowledge. But even in English, is "to be ignorant" a privileged way of expressing ignorance? In two preregistered experiments, we asked English speakers to assess the naturalness of different ignorance-related expressions in brief vignettes sampling four varieties of ignorance introduced by Peels (2023). In Experiment 1, expressions involving simple negation of knowledge (i.e., "not to know") were judged more natural than "to be ignorant", both overall and across all varieties. Experiment 2 tested whether "to be ignorant" is especially appropriate when the agent is expected to know the relevant fact. This proposal was not supported. These findings suggest that, even in English, ignorance is primarily represented as the absence of epistemic good (e.g., knowledge) rather than as a distinct epistemic predicate.