What do we know about ignorance?

Knowledge is commonly taken to be one of the most important values. But how is it related to its counterpart ignorance? This is the topic of the 2nd edition of the interdisciplinary "CSH Science, Philosophy and Religion Forum" which will take place from June 7 to June 9. Vera Matarese, co-organizer of the event, explains what visitors can expect and what fascinates her about the topic.

Vera Matarese: The forum centers around the topic of ignorance, and it features contributions from scholars with diverse academic interests and intellectual backgrounds. Its aim is therefore to gather knowledge exchange on the topic of ignorance and promote an interdisciplinary reflection on it. In this regard, I think that the participants will have the opportunity to think more and better about what ignorance is and how we should tackle it, learn different approaches to the topic, interact with top scholars in the field and share ideas with them.

Interdisciplinary perspectives are essential to creating stronger intellectual visions. If we want to be virtuous thinkers and researchers, we should not be blind to what happens in other disciplines, rather, we should proactively leverage intellectual diversity in academia. Only by encouraging cross-fertilization of ideas coming from different disciplines, our research gets more valuable. In this regard, the CSH, by sponsoring this forum, is creating an excellent platform that facilitates meaningful communication and collaboration across different academic cultures and research fields.

The forum will help creating and developing a stronger, deeper and more comprehensive vision for the study of ignorance. It will build bridges between different approaches to the topic of ignorance and bring different academic communities together. We expect that the participants will create a novel interdisciplinary approach to the topic of ignorance, gather deeper understanding of it, and find new resources to tackle it.

I hope that the CSH will keep sponsoring the forum and that the collaboration between the CSH, the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Theology will continue. An interesting topic that could be proposed for our next event is the method. While it is common lore that science has its method, an interesting question is whether philosophy and religion have their own methods and if so, to what extent they differ from the scientific method. This question is particularly interesting as there is no one universal scientific method that applies to all scientific disciplines.

I have never researched into the topic of ignorance. However, I have carried out research on particular instances of scientific crisis, where scientists were or are at loss in analyzing cases of replication failures. It was very enlightening for me to investigate how scientists tackle these situations and overcome their state of ignorance by formulating the right questions and finding the right ways to approach them. I am also particularly fascinated by and have been drawn into how astrophysicists can construct exoplanet atmospheric models, by adopting modeling techniques that can overcome our ignorance about exoplanets.

Doing research is trying to push the boundary of knowledge further, and this happens on a personal level, given that there are always certain aspects of my research subject that I do not know, and on the level of the scientific community, as there are aspects that have not been investigated yet or about which there is no consensus. In this second case, I try to expand knowledge by finding the correct questions and the most appropriate ways to answer them, and by checking how other scholars have approached a similar situation in other contexts.

I look forward to all talks, as they all look equally exciting. However, I would particularly recommend the opening lecture of this forum, by Stuart Firestein, Professor at Columbia University, because it will provide an accessible but intellectually stimulating reflection on ignorance and its relation to science. According to him, human ignorance is a valuable state of mind, in his own words, “Scientists do reach after fact and reason, but it is when they are most uncertain that the reaching is often most imaginative.” What I think is that ignorance can be a valuable state of mind only if the ignorant is aware of their ignorance. We are all ignorant about something, but as Amos Bronson Alcott said, the ignorant’s worst malady is to be ignorant of their ignorance. This workshop, and Prof. Firestein’s talk in particular, will certainly provide a remedy for this malady.