A Logical Analysis of Pluralistic Ignorance

ABSTRACT In this paper, we give a logical analysis of pluralistic ignorance, which is an important social phenomenon. There has been no consensus about the definition of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. From an epistemic point of view, there are at least three definitions of pluralistic ignorance. We choose three definitions among them, which, for us, are natural to explain many classic examples of phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance in the literature of social and behavioural sciences, e.g., (American) college campuses, The Emperor's New Clothes. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no logical study on the three definitions of pluralistic ignorance yet. We take the three operators of pluralistic ignorance induced by the definitions as first‐class citizens and investigate their logical properties, including the similarities, differences and the interactions, where we find some interesting results; in particular, under the assumption that beliefs are consistent and negatively introspective, a group cannot be second‐order pluralistically ignorant, and thus not be any higher order pluralistically ignorant. This contrasts with Fitch's result in “Ignorance of ignorance” (Kit Fine, Synthese , 2018) that under the same assumption, one may be second‐order ignorant, even though under the assumption of the modal system S4 (semantically, the class of transitive and reflexive frames), one cannot know that one is second‐order ignorant.