Sociology of scientific ignorance

The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is the study of ignorance in and of science. The most common way is to see ignorance as something relevant, rather than simply lack of knowledge. There are two distinct areas in which SSI is being studied: some focus on ignorance in scientific research, whereas other focus on public ignorance of science. Sociology of scientific ignorance is a complementary field to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).

When studying ignorance in scientific research, the common standpoint is that ignorance can be used as a tool in science. An example of this is blackboxing, which is the notion that it can be beneficial to hide the internal parts of a system, and only make the input and output visible to the user.

Studies of public ignorance of science focuses on how scientific ignorance can affect society, the public view of science, and what can give rise to public ignorance of science. This area is related to public understanding of science.

Generally, the word 'ignorance' has a negative tone to it, and for a long time scientific ignorance was viewed as a purely negative thing. Recently, however, people have started to abandon this idea, and instead try to find uses of deliberate ignorance. This has generally been called useful ignorance. A first step in finding uses of ignorance is realizing that ignorance is inevitable. As Matthias Gross says: "new knowledge also means more ignorance". Gross also talks about the connection between ignorance and surprise. Surprise can reveal what scientists are ignorant of, which help them focus their research in order to gain knowledge. On the other hand, ignorance is what gives rise to surprise, making the two very connected.

In correspondence with knowledge mobilization, which refers to moving available knowledge into use, a concept of 'ignorance mobilization' has been introduced. "Ignorance mobilization can be understood as the use of ignorance towards the achievement of goals." This concept also makes a distinction between two types of ignorance: active non-knowledge is ignorance that is intentionally or unintentionally taken into account within science; latent non-knowledge is ignorance that is not taken into account. The latter more resembles the old view of ignorance, as lack of knowledge. Ignorance mobilization can be said to aim to change latent non-knowledge into active non-knowledge, thereby making it useful for further research.

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