On Refusing to Believe: Insensitivity and Self-Ignorance

Developing some insights from Ortega and Wittgenstein, this paper provides an analysis of the cognitive comfort and cognitive discomfort that can be associated with different kinds of ignorance. Focusing on the kind of pernicious, active ignorance that is constitutive of insensitivity, I examine the defense mechanisms and resistances that block learning and epistemic growth, constituting “the will not to believe” or “the will to ignorance”. Drawing on the recent literature in the epistemology of ignorance, my paper develops arguments for valuing the role of cognitive discomfort in our epistemic life and for an ethics and an epistemology of discomfort that propose micro-practices of resistance to fight insensitivity. Consistent with some insights that can be found in the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Ortega, this paper contends that insensitivity and self-ignorance have to be resisted by cultivating experiences of perplexity or self-estrangement which allow us to see our own perspective in a new and unfamiliar way, from elsewhere or from the perspectives of those who are very different from us.