ABSTRACT
Often, there are excellent reasons for wanting to be ignorant. You are, let’s say, extremely indiscreet. Better perhaps then if you don’t get to know too much about Mary’s brother. Publicity will only make things worse. But, of course, the sceptic cannot help. The knowledge that you fear to have is not the knowledge which he says you lack. A sound demonic or regressive argument will doubtless show that you know nothing about Mary’s brother. Scant consolation if, in some less ambitious reliabilist or evidence-based sense of ‘knowledge’, you still have ample knowledge about this man. Is there some further and properly sceptical argument to show that you lack even that less ambitious kind of knowledge? It seems not. If you are in fact as ignorant about Mary’s brother as you want to be then this will be thanks to special circumstances of the kind that properly sceptical arguments transcend: you didn’t listen to what they said, he kept things very quiet, and so forth.
