About the Book
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance has now become a highly influential and rapidly growing topic in its own right. This new edition of the seminal text in the field is fully revised and includes new and expanded chapters on religion; domestic law and jurisprudence; sexuality and gender studies; memory studies; international relations; psychology; decision-theory; and colonial history.
The study of ignorance has attracted growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing. This handbook reflects the interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies by drawing contributions from economics, sociology, history, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, and related fields to serve as a path-breaking guide to the political, legal and social uses of ignorance in social and political life.
This book will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the important role played by ignorance in contemporary society, culture and politics.
Chapter 21 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
Introduction, 1. Revolutionary epistemology: the promise and peril of ignorance studies, Part I: Remaking the philosophy of ignorance, 2. Ignorance and investigation, 3. Apophatic Ignorance and its Applications, 4. Global white ignorance, 5. On the relation between ignorance and epistemic injustice: an ignorance-first analysis, 6. The Pragmatics of Ignorance, 7. Popper, ignorance, and the emptiness of fallibilism, 8. Literary ignorance, Part II: The Production of Ignorance as a Resource: Productively Coping with Knowledge Gaps, 9. Forbidden Knowledge in a Post-Truth Era, 10. Ignorance and the Epistemic Choreography of Social Research, 11. Sharing the Resources of Ignorance, 12. Ignorance of Model Uncertainty and its Effects on Ethics and Society Using the Example of Geosciences, 13. Expect the Unexpected: Experimental Music, or the Ignorance of Sound Design, 14. Ignorance and the Brain: Are There Distinct Kinds of Unknowns?, 15. Linguistics and ignorance, Part III: Valuing and Managing the Unknown in Science, Technology, and Medicine, 16. Undone science and social movements: A review and typology, 17. Science: For better or worse, a source of ignorance as well as knowledge, 18. Lost in Space: Place, Space, and Scale in the Production of Ignorance, 19. Ignorance and Industry: Agrichemicals and Honey Bee Deaths, 20. Tackling the Corona Pandemic: Managing Nonknowledge in Political Decision-Making, 21. The Pandemic as we know it: Ignorance and Non-knowledge in COVID-19 Policy, 22. The right not to know and the dynamics of biomedical knowledge production: fighting a losing battle?, Part IV: Power, oppression and hierarchies of ignorance, 23. Intersectional ignorance in women’s sport, 24. Sexual Injustice and Willful Ignorance, 25. Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religious ignorance, 26. On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba, 27. Democracy and Practices of Ignorance, Part V: Behavioral ignorance and political economy: towards a new dynamism, 28. Targeting Ignorance to Change Behavior, 29. Rational ignorance, 30. Knowledge Resistance, 31. Criminal ignorance, environmental harms and processes of denial, 32. Ignorance is strength? Intelligence, security, and national secrets, 33. Decision-theoretic approaches to non-knowledge in economics, 34. Organizational ignorance Afterword, 35. Ignorance Studies: State of the Art
