January 15, 2005

• I went looking for a word.

  Maybe the word I hoped to find doesn’t exist in English, or perhaps I was using the wrong search terms.

  I started at Google with “aggressive ignorance.”  Of the 659
  results returned, 301 concerned George Bush, so I knew that someone out
  there understands the concept I was thinking of.  However, none of
  them was able to condense that concept into a single succinct word for
  me.

  Next, I tried Onelook’s Reverse Dictionary. 
  There I got over 200 results, but most of them were obviously related
  only to aggressive, such as vicious and belligerence, or to ignorance,
  such as benighted and unenlightened.  None of the words I found
  encompassed both ideas, but they did give me a lot of new phrases:

  pervicacious unknowing
  truculent nescience
  fierce agnosy
  vicious unenlightenment
  pushy inexperience

  By now, I was really having fun with this.  To refine my search, I
  expanded on the idea I had in mind.  In the reverse dictionary
  search box, I entered, “premeditated or complicit innocence, willful or
  aggressive ignorance.”

  That was when I got completely off-track.  It was becoming evident
  that I would not find the word I sought, so I just started exploring
  some of the terms I had gotten.

  Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion)
  is the logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be
  valid, but which proves or supports a different proposition than the
  one it is purporting to prove or support.

  omninescience:  ignorance of everything, universal ignorance

  Socratic irony is feigned ignorance, and feigned belief that one’s
  interlocutor knows the truth about something, in order to provoke
  discussion and advance the search for truth. Practised by Socrates in
  the Platonic dialogues, this term has become widely used to describe
  the practices of other philosophers whose method is analogically
  similar to that of Socrates in the dialogs.

  agniology:  the philosophical study of ignorance

  Market theology is a pejorative term describing the apparent belief that value conflicts are always best resolved by markets – a wilful ignorance
  of the role of states and state power balances in underlying political
  economy.  Market theology is said, by its opponents, to be an
  assumption of neoclassical philosophy, and also taken for granted by
  other globalization advocates who practice right-wing politics. Even if
  they profess some other value system, in practice, they permit
  commodity markets, currency markets, and other financial architecture
  to make value decisions that they have themselves abandoned any attempt
  to influence, simply serving the current holders of property rights and
  intellectual rights with a sort of fatalism derived from lack of
  ability to see any other way to resolve basic moral conflicts. They
  describe this as a sort of market fascism or hegemony called the New
  totalitarianism.

  There was more, much more.  There was somewhat more in the
  first version of this blog, which vanished when the computer shut
  itself off at the same time that I felt a sharp earthquake. shortly
  before 9 PM.

  ---

  I’ve been feeling little earthquakes all day.  The Alaska
  Earthquake Information Center lists seventeen today.  Also, in the
  last day or two the BIGQUAKE list is finally showing activity elsewhere
  than around the Indian Ocean.  For almost three weeks, and a total
  of nearly 70 quakes over magnitude 5.5, the threshhold for making that
  list, only three of those quakes were anywhere other than near the
  epicenter of the big Indonesian quake.  Now, the Ring of Fire is
  shakin’ again.

  

  • 2:59 am
  • 10 Comments