Hope, knowledge, and blindspots

Jordan Dodd

pp. 531-543

in: Richard Dawid (ed), A philosophical look at the discovery of the Higgs boson, Synthese 194 (2), 2017.

Abstract

Roy Sorensen introduced the concept of an epistemic blindspot in the 1980s. A proposition is an epistemic blindspot for some individual at some time if and only if that proposition is consistent but unknowable by that individual at that time. In the first half of this paper, I extend Sorensen work on blindspots by arguing that there exist blindspots that essentially involve hopes. In the second half, I show how such blindspots can contribute to and impair different pursuits of self-understanding. My arguments throughout this paper draw on Luc Bovens’s account of hope.

Cited authors

Bovens Luc