Ignorance: How it drives science by Stuart Firestein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Power of Not Knowing

The 19th century American philosopher C.S. Peirce was, I think, the first to point out that all inquiry is provoked by doubt.* Before there is a fact, there must be a concern. Concern implies doubt. And doubt implies ignorance. Firestein defines ignorance in a way that Peirce would certainly approve: “It is not an individual lack of information but a communal gap in knowledge. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense, don’t add up to a coherent explanation, cannot be used to make a prediction or statement about some thing or event. This is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance.”

That productive ignorance is a communal attribute is a great insight. None of us knows what all of us knows; but we each can have access to what another knows if required. We can ask for it, or more likely just do a Google search. But what none of us knows is beyond language. We cannot ask for it because it hasn’t yet been brought into the intelligible world of language. The process by which the unknown is brought into language is what is meant by scientific method. But as Firestein points out through his case studies and analysis, this process has no fixed rules. Just as language itself has no fixed rules of development, the way in which new knowledge is created, that is, brought into language, is equally amorphous... and even mysterious.

Firestein locates the precise origin of any inquiry in a question. So did Peirce. In science a question is typically stated as an hypothesis, for example: ‘The theory of relativity predicts that gravity will affect the transmission of light. Can this be measured?’ It is the formulation of such hypotheses that is the really intriguing (and unsystematic) part of scientific inquiry. It’s the bit that no one has been able to specify reliably as an algorithm in an ‘expert system.’ While such systems are capable of generating a virtual infinity of inferences, and therefore hypotheses, from existing models and factual knowledge, they are unable to determine which of these is most interesting as a target of inquiry.

The determination of interesting, that is to say important or valuable, questions in science or anywhere else, is a political issue. The community rules. Even if the community is ultimately shown to be in error, it is only the community that decides this. The community may not always be right but it is never wrong. The reason for this apparent contradiction is that it is the community which is the arbiter of standards of rightness and wrongness. And it is these standards that are changing more or less continuously in science, as they also do in all political systems. The criterion for what constitutes good science today is as different from that of the nineteenth century as are the criterion for democratic election in each period.

So science really can’t be a commitment to truth since truth only applies to that which is already formulated within language. Nor is it a commitment to some universal method or standards of research since these change continuously within the scientific community. Rather science is a commitment to the community of scientists; more precisely a commitment to the politics of that community at any given time. Rivalry rather than cooperation and personal disdain rather than admiration are often part of this politics. But scientists, in order to be scientists at all, submit to the ultimate judgements of this community.

Peirce’s friend and collaborator, the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce generalised Peirce’s idea of the scientific community. Royce used the term ‘loyalty to loyalty’ to refer to the kind of communal relations which accommodates even the most contentious disagreements. But there are severe problems with this formulation, among others the implication that the object of loyalty is irrelevant. Loyalty itself thereby becomes an absolute and applies as much to a commitment, say, to a fascist dictator as to the profession of medicine.

Firestein solves this Pericean/Roycean problem by defining the commitment of authentic inquiry to ignorance. Such a commitment is the sign of membership in the community as well as an indication of the activity demanded of those included within it - to bring that which is yet beyond language into language. Such activity does not reduce ignorance. Productive inquiry is much more likely to create yet more uncertainty and doubt, paradoxically expanding the domain of ignorance. A commitment to ignorance is a stand against doctrine, and therefore a stand against those who believe they already know all that needs to be known. But it is also a stand for an inclusive community which admits anyone with doubts.

This is the real power of not knowing - it continuously relativises the very tool it uses, language, to remind both scientists and everyone else that reality always lies beyond what can be said about it.

* Firestein quotes Peirce’s contemporary, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” But I am fairly certain Peirce made the point first.

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