... Dasgupta presents a second motivation in “The bare necessities” against Maudlin’s epistemological argument:
Maudlin’s view implies that whether something is detectable depends on factors that are, intuitively, entirely irrelevant to the matter. For on his view, whether our location in Newtonian space is detectable depends on whether or not we can ask open questions. So, for example, suppose that God had a favorite point in space. Then we would be able to ask open questions about our location in space, for example “Am I 3 feet or 6 feet from God’s favorite point?” On Maudlin’s view, it would then turn out that location is undetectable after all. So on Maudlin’s view, whether absolute position is detectable or not depends on whether God had a favorite point. And that seems clearly false: whether or not God has a favorite point is surely irrelevant to my epistemic situation vis a vis our position in space!
(Dasgupta, 2011, p. 146)
Again, this objection misses the mark. The reason, in this case, is that by introducing a privileged spacetime point, Dasgupta is changing the spacetime setting of NGT—in particular, he is augmenting Galilean/ Newtonian spacetime with extra structure, effectively transforming it to what is sometimes referred to as Aristotelian spacetime (see Earman, 1989, pp. 34–35). If such a point were to exist, there would be questions which we could not answer, even in principle (much as in the case of the kinematic shift). This, of course (by a plausible and minimal Occamist norm—cf. Dasgupta, 2016), is precisely why we should not believe in the existence of such a point! The issue with Dasgupta’s objection here, then, is that it merely moves the goalposts, and affords one no reason to think that there is any problem with the epistemological argument per se, when such a privileged spacetime point is not introduced.
In “Inexpressible ignorance,” Dasgupta contemplates a very similar situation: a world of two-way eternal recurrence (divided into “epochs,” ei), but with one exception: there is a “special” epoch eS, which “differs from the rest just in the fact that one electron is a little to the left of its counterparts in other epochs” (Dasgupta, 2015a, p. 448). On this case, Dasgupta writes that
Maudlin’s view . . . implies that, were that electron a little bit over to the right, I would not be ignorant of which epoch I inhabit. And this is hard to take seriously: surely my ignorance of which epoch I inhabit cannot be cured by minute changes in far-off epochs!
(Dasgupta, 2015a, p. 448)
In response to this, however, we side with Perry, who writes that
It seems that Dasgupta is simply wrong here. There is no sense in which the change from [the world with eS] to [an otherwise-identical world without eS] merely removes expressibility. Everything we are expressibly ignorant of in [the former] is either false in [the latter], or is something we’re also expressibly ignorant of in [the latter].
(Perry, 2017, p. 232)
The overarching point is this: Dasgupta’s various motivations for inexpressible ignorance by appeal to “perturbed” worlds (whether said perturbation is applied at the level of spacetime structure, or at the level of the material content of that world) do not succeed, for they illegitimately transfer expressible ignorance in the former case, to inexpressible ignorance in the latter case, while not recognizing the alternative: that there is simply no ignorance at all in the latter case.
