First, the paper surveys recent what I term “varieties of strategies ignorance” – the multiple and varied ways that different disciplines, from philosophy to economics, have treated the productive uses of ignorance in organizational and social life. Surveying this literature, I suggest that analyses of strategic ignorance mirror the same disciplinary bifurcations that have hampered the study of knowledge production. Behavioural economists have tended to study the strategic use of ignorance at the individual level, while sociologists have emphasized the structural inequalities that render deliberate ignorance a powerful resource to groups whose power rests on the perpetuation of partial truths or deliberate misconceptions that masquerade as objective knowledge. To better understand this bifurcation, I introduce two conceptual heuristics: “pyrrhic ontologies” vs. “pirate ontologies.” Pyrrhic ontologies are theoretical worldviews which undermine their own political utility the more persuasive and accurate they turn out to be. I contrast these with “pirate ontologies:” theoretical worldviews that succeed in dominating new policy spheres or academic subgenres as a result of their empirical inaccuracy or uselessness in practice. 

Of interest in view of the workshop: