Can Ideas Encourage Ignorance?
Can Ideas Encourage Ignorance? Wednesday January 11, 2006 Most people value the spread of knowledge and perhaps think that increases in ideas will, in the long run, increase what we know. Maybe that is true, but in the short run at least it may be possible for ideas to actually encourage ignorance rather than knowledge. Becky discusses writings by Karl Popper: I think its a useful perspective to think about how ignorance can actually be created, generated, or encouraged by particular ideas. It seems that sometimes an idea can both help to generate lots of knowledge growth and ignorance at the time. I agree that this is worth pondering. Some ideas could obviously encourage ignorance for example, the idea that knowing too much is immoral. Other ideas might accomplish the same in a more subtle way. I think that its arguable that Intelligent Design does this: by positing an unknown and unknowable,
