We Throw Ourselves into the Unknown and Thus, We Advance

 Firestein’s book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science is worth a good second read. It accurately describes the current collective mental state and methods of companies and countries that move ahead or fall behind. Though science has moved beyond some points in the 2012 book, the book still lays out a good game plan for conscious, positive, and innovative change.

 James Clark Maxwell described conscious ignorance as a prelude to every advance in science. Conscious ignorance is our awareness and willingness to want to know new things, answer our questions, and find fact where only belief existed before. This drives research, data collection, and sometimes, finds real causation.

This movement of thought and belief is powered by negative capability. Negative capability is the potential to move mind, body, and thought into the unknown, stringing together what we know to build new theories without fear. Syllogisms, valid or not, are a tool of negative capability. We can reason in an area we have never before occupied, mentally or physically.

We should not confuse conscious ignorance with stupidity or ignorance. There are two types of ignorance:

1.     Willful stupidity, which is an indifference to, not a lack thereof, facts or logic. In this, the person chooses to be uninformed and unenlightened, or

2.     A condition, in which there is an absence of facts or data. This situation leads us to create better questions about what is unknown to attempt to overcome the condition.

Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Firestein

 What we know collectively is huge though what we don’t know is far more vast and incredibly interesting. The repetition of fact or pseudo-fact is boring or misleading and nothing is subject to articulated change as much as science. What was known decades or weeks ago may be refuted through better research methods and possibly even by chance. Often, a smug adherence to current hard and soft scientific belief is a potential trapdoor in the very near future.

 Mistakes, if noted as such, and not trumpeted as Neo-Fact, become important steps to solve the problem. Those who hit a wall on a specific subject of research are contributing to the speed of new important discoveries in a way similar to differential diagnosis. We cross out the reasons and methods that do not work. This is important as new subjects and pursuits may be far more complicated simply by our limited mental capability. Our output, as much as computers, is limited by the inputs. This is why both conscious ignorance and negative capability are so important to human advancement and survival.

 “Alice B. Toklas: What is the answer? Gertrude Stein: What is the question?”

  “The reason to exist is to act.” (John Krakauer) and “ask the smaller questions surrounding the big question first” (Stuart Firestein) seem to be pretty good mantras for beginning to understand anything in our world and beyond.

 Ignorance: How It Drives Science - Stuart Firestein

Oxford University Press 2012