The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
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无知者：战略无知如何统治世界
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
2.7
通讯作者：
S. Frickel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Frickel
《未知者：战略性无知如何统治世界》（The Unknowers：How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World）一书中，林西·麦戈伊（Linsey McGoey）是无知研究的主要大使之一。这本书是对该领域的一个受欢迎的贡献，尤其是在当前，由于联邦政府应对措施的严重无能，与流行病相关的不确定性不断上升（至少在美国是如此）。这是昨天（7月14日）的一个标题：“特朗普政府剥夺了CDC对冠状病毒数据的控制权”（Stolberg 2020）。另一个来自今天：“不知道，这只是杀死我们”-家长，教师与重新开放学校摔跤（国王等人。公众对无知的关注已经成为一种礼节。这本书有很多优点，除了它的时效性。我只举三个例子。《未知者》在展示知识和无知，或者知道和不知道是如何共同构成的方面是创新的。麦戈伊并不是第一个提出这一主张的人，但她比大多数人更进一步地观察到，“知识和无知并不像它们第一次出现时那样容易排列”（第296页）。这种见解--无知可以是好的或坏的，在一定程度上是“有用的”--对科学有着深远的影响，科学植根于知识理论（认识论）而不是非知识理论（不可知论），更广泛地说，对公民生活也有着深远的影响，公民生活源于我们经常与启蒙运动联系在一起的价值观（民主、理性）。这本书还令人信服地说明了为什么无知很重要。McGoey的核心论点是，虽然我们在“不知道”的能力方面都是平等的，但那些处于文化和经济权力地位的人特别善于战略性地利用无知来促进他们的个人和机构利益。在她看来，精英的无知正在加剧社会不平等，侵蚀民主。她敦促她的读者研究公民生活中的无知，以更好地制定关注未知的社会政策，并以这种方式深化民主。为了指导我们，McGoey提出了一个新的战略无知理论。她认为，“个人的忽视行为”积累并固化为“僵化的意识形态信念和政策观点，掩盖了[个人]自己的错误假设”，反过来又强化了个人的忽视偏好（第12页）。对“市场原教旨主义”的广泛信仰是麦戈伊最喜欢的微观到宏观无知循环的例子，但许多其他根深蒂固的文化信仰也同样很好地说明了这一点。(Peer复习，任何人？（教师自治）。她的模型是雄心勃勃的，将个人的无知与社会结构中的无知联系起来，但它也很简单，而且在某些方面还不发达。因此，适当地，它仍然是其他人使用，完善，调整和扩展的理论。在我看来，麦戈伊对无知的审视过于宽泛，同时也有点狭隘。第一，广度。对于一本主要关注“专家无知”的危险的书来说，其中关于专业知识或专业知识文化的内容比我希望找到的要少。书中的章节充斥着对经济学家、律师和企业高管及其思想的观察，很少关注经济学、法律和金融学的认识文化，也很少关注无知与这些文化的关系（她对英美法学中故意视而不见和犯罪意图改革的讨论最为接近）。相反，麦戈伊将无知视为公共和知识话语中一个完全常见（如果被低估）的特征，通常涉及学者、政治家、首席执行官、技术专家和其他专家类型认为他们所知道的事情。McGoey的论点来源也是多种多样的，从亚当·斯密的《国富论》到
With The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World, Linsey McGoey commands her position as one of Ignorance Studies’ premier ambassadors. The book is a welcome contribution to the field, especially now, amidst rising seas of pandemic-related uncertainty compounded, in the US at least, by the savage incompetence of the federal government’s response. Here is a headline from yesterday (14 July): ‘Trump administration strips C.D.C. of control of coronavirus data’ (Stolberg 2020). Another from today: ‘“Not knowing, it’s just killing us” – parents, teachers wrestle with reopening schools’ (King et al. 2020). Public attention to ignorance has become de rigueur. There are a lot of things going for this book, besides its timeliness. I’ll point to just three. The Unknowers is innovative in showing how knowledge and ignorance, or knowing and unknowing, are co-constitutive. McGoey is not the first to make this claim, but she goes further than most in her observation that ‘knowledge and ignorance are not as easy to rank as they first appear’ (p. 296). This insight – that ignorance can be good or bad, by degrees ‘useful’ – has profound implications for the sciences, which are rooted in theories of knowledge (epistemology) but not nonknowledge (agnotology), and more broadly for civic life flowing from values (democracy, reason) that we often associate with the Enlightenment. The book also makes a convincing case for why ignorance matters. McGoey’s core argument is that, while we are all equal in our capacity to ‘unknow,’ those in positions of cultural and economic power have been especially adept at using ignorance strategically to advance their personal and institutional interests. In her view, elite ignorance is increasing social inequality and eroding democracy. She urges her readers to study ignorance in civic life to better develop social policies that are mindful of the unknown and in this way, to deepen democracy. To guide us, McGoey proposes a new theory of strategic ignorance. She posits that ‘individual acts of ignoring’ accumulate and solidify into ‘rigid ideological beliefs and policy perspectives that obscure [individuals’] own mistaken assumptions,’ in turn reinforcing individuals’ predilection to ignore (p. 12). Widespread belief in ‘market fundamentalism’ is McGoey’s favorite example of the microto macro-ignorance cycle, but many other deeply embedded cultural beliefs would serve equally well to make the point. (Peer review, anyone? Faculty self-governance?). Her model is ambitious, linking ignorance in individuals to ignorance embedded in social structures, but it is also quite simple, and in some ways underdeveloped. Appropriately then, it remains for others to use, refine, adapt, and extend the theory. For my taste, McGoey’s examination of ignorance is overly broad and, at the same time, a bit narrow. First, breadth. For a book concerned primarily with the dangers of ‘expert ignorance,’ there is less in it about expertise or professional epistemic cultures than I had hoped to find. With chapters chock full of observations about economists as well as lawyers and business executives and their ideas, there is little attention to the epistemic cultures of economics, law, and finance or what ignorance has to do with it. (Her discussion of willful blindness and mens rea reforms in British and American jurisprudence comes closest.) Instead, McGoey casts ignorance as an utterly common (if underappreciated) feature of public and intellectual discourse involving, very generally, what academics, politicians, CEOs, technologists, and other expert-types think they know. Sources for McGoey’s argument are just as varied, ranging from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to