Matthias GROSS, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Germany
Ignorance has a bad reputation. Ignorant people are rendered stupid, uneducated, or simply as denying available knowledge. Worse, recent debates on fake-news, post-truth societies, strategic misinformation and the like apparently foster this notion. However, as the Corona virus has again shown quite plainly, very often political decisions must be made well before “official” scientific evidence is available and even once it is available many results still point to even more knowledge gaps no one has been aware of before. Thus, decision making processes under situations of ignorance or “nonknowledge” seem to be normal. To further the workshop’s discussion the core question raised is: Can ignorance be made transparent in such a way that a concerned public understands why it is unavoidable and not necessarily a sign for laziness, stupidity, collapse, or disinformation? This presentation will thus focus on the problematic relationship between transparency and ignorance in order to discuss on how sidestepping ignorance with rhetorics of certainty and “truth” may not be the right path to cope with the fact that knowledge and its natural flipside often seem to increase on the same footing. It seems that what is needed are novel ways to present, describe, and frame nonknowledge in a “transparent” manner so that scientists, citizens, engineers, and policy makers have an alternative to assessments based on limited data and figures or, even more important, to feeling urged to trumpeting safety when there is none