Sunday, February 20, 2011
Peter L. Shillingsburg
Another way to dissect ignorance is to note that it comes in two majorforms with infinite, it seems, sub-variations: The first consists of absenceof knowledge. It is the condition felt when one is confronted with a question the answer to which is "I do not know." The second form is farmore pernicious because it frequently goes undetected. It is the condition that arises when we are confronted with a question for which we have ananswer we believe to be applicable but that in fact is not applicable or isflawed by undetected misinformation. "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge." But the illusion of knowledge IS ignorance, too.
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ReplyDeleteElectronic Representations of Literary Texts
By Peter L. Shillingsburg
De Montfort University, Leicester
Print Publication Year: 2006
A brief anatomy of type one – absence of knowledge – might include the following:
ReplyDeleteAccidental or inadvertent ignorance
resulting from the bad luck of having searched for and failed to find all the relevant knowledge or having failed to imagine the question that would have led to discovery.
Insouciant ignorance
resulting from a short attention span, lack of energy, or some other form of laziness in the search for the relevant. Its mottoes are ‘‘Enough already’’ and ‘‘I hope this will do.’’
Willful or deliberate ignorance
resulting from a desire to protect an idea, conclusion, bias, or tradition from too close a scrutiny and too intense a barrage of testing information. On this subject Francis Bacon’s discourse on the Four Idols that oppose clear thinking is an excellent text.
Non-fatal or trivial ignorance
consisting of information that even if known would not make a difference. Such information when present and known might be thought of as noise, even when the information is accurate, such as the scratches on a vinyl record or audience coughs in a live recording, which we tend to edit out, though they have a factual presence.
Fatal ignorance
consisting of a failure to know that which would cause us to abandon our position altogether or which causes decisions leading to disastrous, disappointing, or dead-end investigations.
It is the second form of Ignorance, however, consisting of unexposed misinformation or error, that is the most pernicious and dangerous; for it leads to misunderstanding, and misunderstanding – until detected as such – goes by the name of understanding. It too can be anatomized:
ReplyDeleteBogus information,
false positives, and ‘‘false facts’’ may possibly be innocent in that holding this type of intellectual currency may qualify the holder as a victim rather than the perpetrator of deceit. It could be that every effort had been made to eliminate error and the effort has fallen short. Innocence in this case does not, however, exempt the victim from the consequences of error. Error tends to persist, though frequently it persists because it is perpetuated by writers who fail to test the validity of their evidence.
Fraud,
scientific malfeasance, fakes, and forgeries are anything but innocent; the perpetrators deserve our scorn and abhorrence.
Forgetting
is very much like ignorance in that one sometimes knows that one has forgotten and can take steps to retrieve that which memory will not serve up voluntarily. But memory sometimes pretends that it
has not forgotten, and we are frequently the victims of false memories. To aid memory, pens, paper, and computers were invented, and to prevent false memories, verification and double checking are required. Milan Kundera’s novel titled Ignorance is an excellent text on the problems of memory.
Although this has been a rehearsal of the obvious and well known, it is worth saying that reminders of the dangers of ignorance do not help us identify an enemy that can be overcome by hard work, deeper digging, more comprehensive reading, more precise thinking, or better research techniques. However much we may fail as individuals, as scholars we are committed to doing all that can be done to overcome ignorance. But like noise and poverty, ignorance will never be suppressed because it cannot be attacked in all its forms. Let us look at the consequences of the irrepressibility of error and of not knowing. Let us contemplate the role of ignorance IN literary studies and not focus for now on what can or should be done to ban ignorance FROM literary studies. If ignorance cannot be banned from literary or any other kind of study, we must confront that notion and learn to live with it as a basic condition.
ReplyDeletePut that a different way: If we believe that scholarship is devoted to discovering truth and to beating back the dark veil of ignorance, we must also believe that truth can be ascertained and established. If that were so, those who possess the certainty of truth would be right to impose their views on those who have failed to possess the truth. In that view of things, ignorance is a deplorable but temporary condition. Put starkly, a world in which truth could be established requires the separation of that which is right from that which is wrong, that which is verified from that which does not pass the test of verification, that which can be relied upon from that which is proven unreliable. In its extreme form, this view of the scholar’s task demands absolute standards: answers to questions would then either be absolute or unsatisfactory.
Support for this view transcends academia, for it carries political strength and provides, for some, religious comfort. We see it in claims that a single truth is necessary to the orderly continuance of society as we know it, and that to tolerate the notion of competing truths is to introduce chaos and uncertainty into socio-political conditions leading to unnecessary contentiousness at best and anarchy at worst. It is some form of this idea of certainty that makes Empire possible, be it military, political, cultural, or commercial. The notion that we are right easily transforms into the notion that we have the right. This position makes what most thinking persons will already have recognized as a confusion. Let me try to be clear about this: It is possible that there is a right and a wrong in matters about which men and women dispute. It is not necessarily the case that there are multiple right views. But the role of ignorance IN scholarship and, indeed, in life itself is to undermine the certainty that anyone’s view of a subject actually corresponds with that true one. The question of whether there is or is not a single correct way to view things is quite different from the question of whether any one person, group, or government has with certainty hit upon that correct view. Tolerance for multiple points of view does not introduce uncertainty. Uncertainty already inheres in the whole inquisitive and communicative enterprise because, even if there were no other reasons, ignorance is inescapable. There will always be some things one cannot know and some things one thinks one knows that are not so. This is not an enemy of intelligence and of illumination; it is a condition of the medium in which we exist. The consequences of this condition are that postures of certainty, familiar to us both in politics and academia, are not intellectually sustainable.
The way in which ignorance is a tool of literary study is that it prevents arrogance, intellectual tyranny and absolutism, and encourages humility, alertness, tentativeness, and tolerance for alternative explanations. It also promotes a spirit of inquiry and testing that prevents the acceptance of dicta handed down by authorities in the field. Every proposition remains always open for question and revision.
ReplyDeleteOne does not, because of the prevalence of ignorance or uncertainty, give up the pursuit of facts or the attempt to analyze them and draw conclusions. No more does a farmer, upon discovering that his field is rocky, with rocks under every rock he removes, cease to cultivate or plant. Upon establishing the ground conditions of his existence, he determines which crops do well in that soil and proceeds accordingly. Recognizing the inevitable conditions of ignorance, noise, terror, evil, and poverty, we must determine what can be done and proceed accordingly. My first point, then, is that recognizing the inevitability of ignorance leads to an acceptance of uncertainty. And it follows that certainty, dogma, arrogance, and the forceful imposition of one’s views upon others cannot be intelligently sustained. What other course do we have? What discipline is left open to us?