Introduction to the research

Introduction

The Ignorance in question is political ignorance, hereafter defined as “Ignorant of facts underpin political debate”.

The only reaction to Ignorance is its reduction. This premise is often the starting point of many contemporary studies on ignorance, either explicitly through its active employment, or implicitly by tacit recognition. Based on this foundation, studies of ignorance focused on finding a cure to ignorance.

This focus, and its founding premise, will be challenged here.

There are three challenges: Two against the focus, one against the founding premise. They will show that, the focus on ‘cures’ is a confusion caused by a premise inept to bear rational scrutiny:

The first challenge is against the focus’ contradictory nature, between the reality uncovered by it and the theories explaining them.

Many studies have recognised various natural limits in agent’s capacity in political and economical decision-making, which cause ignorance. These limits come in the form of time, resources, the time period we live in, and agent’s cognitive capacity. Not all, like agent’s cognitive capacity, are unchangeable, for example, the time period we live in.

Despite their recognition of these often unchangeable limits, scholars remain committed to condemn and, attempt to reduce ignorance through changing the unchangeable limits, namely in the debate on sophisticated and sufficient voters.
Worse, some scholars decided to ignore these limits altogether by advocating for creation of an omniscient few to compensate for the ignorant masses.

How can one, if not contradicting one self, at once recognise and attempt to change, or ignore, an unchangeable matter simultaneously?

The second challenge is a by-product of the first: The focus on finding or legitimising existing ‘cures’ to ignorance, such as heuristics, or ignorance as rational chose, is distractive to more relevant questions raised by the studies on ignorance,It will be shown that, rather than learning how to “cope” with ignorance, it is more relevant to ask ourselves: Is more knowledge the only reaction to ignorance? Does more knowledge and information remedy ignorance? How could we react to ignorance to our advantage?

Third challenge is against the founding premise itself by providing answers for the aforementioned questions about ignorance.

Contrary to reduction, embrace ignorance is a more consistent approach to the reality of ignorance. Embrace ignorance is beyond mere recognition, but active inclusion, and passively mindful of ignorance in our deliberations.

Under the light of embrace ignorance, more knowledge and information alone does not remedy ignorance, it is the capacity to digest knowledge and information gives value to more knowledge and information.

Embrace ignorance doesn’t require more knowledge, but reconciliation to our limits in resources, times, capacity and time period constrain. Under this light, it will be unrealistic to expect omniscience in agents. Instead, agents should recognise ignorance and remain open-minded in recognising facts and information outside of our theoretical framework.