All research begins with ignorance

Chris sent in this quote from Bill James:

“All research,” he says, “begins with ignorance. The ability to focus on what it is that you do not know is critical to doing research. I’m absolutely convinced that none of us understands the world.

“I’m not a person that the world irritates, to quote Bill Buckley, but you turn on the radio and in any debate, you’ve got people who are convinced they know. Liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, people who think Terry Francona is a genius, those that think he’s an idiot. They’re all convinced they’ve got this figured out.

“None of them has it figured out. We do not understand the world; the world is billions of times more complicated than our minds.

“You can make a useful contribution to a discussion if you can figure out specifically what it is you don’t understand and try to work on it. If you try to start from the other end – ‘I’ve got the world figured out and I’m going to explain it to everybody’ – maybe there are a lot of people who succeed in doing that, but it doesn’t work for me.”

I agree. As Earl Weaver said, it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

1 thought on “All research begins with ignorance

  1. That science starts from a position of ignorance is a philosophy that, while I am sympathetic to it, I do not share. I think it is more realistic to say that science works when researchers do not believe they are ignorant, but rather, believe they know something but are open to change.
    What you *think* you know tells you how to find out what you don't know. Your hunches, theories, and guesses, are all necessary to the process. It is difficult to make sense of data without a theoretical structure to interpret it. If Copernicus had not advanced heliocentrism (even though it fit the data worse then the Ptolemeic theory) Kepler would not have been able to interpret Brahe's data on planetary motion so elegantly. In this sense, I like Lakatos' view of the philosophy of science.

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