Ignoramus Defined
It sometimes still surprises me where an idea can take you.
I was listening to a podcast episode from the great BBC radio series In Our Time when one of the participants pronounced the word “ignoramus” with her Israeli accent. It came out…
“ignore amoose”
…and after she repeated it several times, I suddenly realized that most people I’ve (perhaps harshly) judged as ignoramuses tend to ignore facts presented to them when they conflict with their preconceptions - woo-woo, or otherwise.
The above was all I was going to write on the subject, but plugging it into Google to check my spelling, up came a proposed search term “Ignoramus et ignorabimus.” It turns out this is a Latin maxim meaning “We do not know and we will not know.” According to the Wikipedia article I stumbled across, it was originally a fairly neutral statement used as an admission of the perceived limits of scientific understanding in the nineteenth century.
These days, I get the sense that a lot of today’s ignoramuses would use it as a defiant motto rather than as a statement of limits one would wish to overcome.
…
Oh, as an aside, if you don’t check out the piece in Wikipedia, I like the response from mathematician David Hilbert…
“We must not believe those, who today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone, prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen! (‘We must know — we will know!’)”
