Ignorance

Abstract

This chapter engages in a prolonged discussion of those episodes of cognition that are not instances of knowledge. More explicitly, it focuses on Tibetan Buddhist epistemological developments in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Three overarching categories of ignorant cognition are discussed: mistaken cognition, nonascertaining perception, and factive assessment. Of particular interest are those cognitions that are correct or true but which, nonetheless, fail to yield knowledge. In examining these forms of cognition, this chapter explores the boundary between knowledge and ignorance, and does so by highlighting the conditions for knowledge that fail to be satisfied in these different forms of ignorant cognition.