Abstract
In the modern world of science and technology, of transparency, accountability and regulatory action it would appear inconceivable to consider progress as the deliberate production of ignorance. Here ignorance is not an unintended consequence but acknowledged to be a precondition for the achievement of technologically embodied knowledge that is not constrained by the requirements and limitations of the human mind. It appears ever more evident that citizens in the age of technoscience are not only coming to terms with, but embracing the hitherto inconceivable surrender of an intellectual conception of knowledge. The paper outlines some of the ways in which the tolerance for ignorance is virtue and necessity for technoscientific research.
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Notes
- 1.
Bacon began with a diagnosis of the pitiful state of theoretical knowledge which – as opposed to the knowledge of artisans – had stagnated for centuries. It came easy for him to jettison this ideal of knowledge. Today and before the backdrop of the amazing success story of modern science it appears far less likely and far more unpalatable to surrender the demand that there ought to be an intellectual grasp of the technological conditions of the world.
- 2.
The brief survey of features of contemporary research that require a tolerance of ignorance draws on Nordmann 2008.
- 3.
To be sure, the question of trust was at issue also in the gentlemanly science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, it was mostly Karl Popper who maintained the ideal of the scientist who takes nothing for granted and questions everything, while Ludwig Wittgenstein or Thomas Kuhn showed that mutual critique requires a shared language or paradigm that must be taken on trust. Compare Shapin 1994, 2008.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Günther Anders speaks here of the discrepancy between what we can produce (herstellen) and what we can conceive, survey, take responsibility for (vorstellen), see Anders 1956. This may also hold, albeit along different lines, for formal systems or computer models that instantiate complex non-linear dynamics and that offer a new kind of technically produced entity for investigation, one that cannot be fitted easily to the requirements of human understanding.
- 7.
The iterations of the design cycle once again play a role here as one seeks to produce a close match between the experimental and the simulated versions of the process.
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Nordmann, A. (2020). The Advancement of Ignorance. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_2
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