Important parts of the Earth’s climate and environment can change in ways that are self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The risks of such changes are under-researched, under-reported in what is communicated by scientists to governments, and underestimated. In the most authoritative science assessments, the most important policy question of all – whether the climate will be stable at low degrees of warming – is hardly even raised.

Hatred for the rich, hatred for business activities, and hatred for entrepreneurs have been common throughout human history. Based on the existing literature, this chapter divides people’s prejudice and hostility towards entrepreneurs into two causes. One is psychological and the other is epistemological. Envy is the psychological cause. A misunderstanding of knowledge is the epistemological cause. Because most people do not understand the importance of soft knowledge, entrepreneurial money making appears to refer to getting “something from nothing.” By combining psychological envy with epistemological ignorance, we get a good understanding of intellectual prejudice towards entrepreneurs. In order to reduce hostility towards entrepreneurs, economists have a responsibility to establish a correct market theory.

Ideally, we want to resist mis/disinformation but not evidence. If this is so, we need accounts of misinformation and disinformation to match the epistemic normative picture developed so far. This chapter develops a full account of the nature of disinformation. The view, if correct, carries high-stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically. First, it challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions about disinformation – such as that it is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, or essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. Second, it shows that the challenges faced by disinformation tracking in practice go well beyond mere fact checking. I begin with an interdisciplinary scoping of the literature in information science, communication studies, computer science, and philosophy of information to identify several claims constituting disinformation orthodoxy. I then present counterexamples to these claims and motivate my alternative account. Finally, I put forth and develop my account: disinformation as ignorance-generating content.

Misinformation and suspicion surrounding sexually transmitted HPV – along with the social implications of administering shots to young girls – significantly hinder worldwide uptake of the vaccine. The 2006 U.S. rollout hit a quagmire of public ignorance, suspicion and paranoia, and by 2020, just 61 percent of eligible U.S. girls had been vaccinated. In Japan, anti-vax sentiment led to an HPV vaccine ban, and in Denmark, the vaccine met similar resistance. Nearly twenty years after its introduction in higher-income countries, the vaccine is vastly behind its prevention potential; in lower-income countries, its trajectory has been abysmal. Hang-ups about sexually transmitted infections and baseless fears about the vaccine have made advocating its use a cause laden with stigma. In male-dominated cultures – and in the absence of an existing delivery system – a girls-only vaccine is often stopped before it can start. And yet, without a worldwide commitment to countering misunderstanding through trust-building, hundreds of thousands of women will miss their critical opportunity to beat this disease.

This chapter establishes that Augustine held that the sins of Christians were venial sins and that these sins were always committed through weakness or ignorance, with the result that Christians remained virtuous while they committed these sins. In contrast, the sins of non-Christians were always damnable sins and these were committed through pride. Through a study of Augustine’s account of the theft of the pears, and of Adam and Eve’s Fall, this chapter shows that Augustine thought that sinning through pride could take two different forms, and that this supported his view that anti-social, other-harming actions (like theft or murder) were not inevitable in the earthly city.

Until the early 1970s, UK immigration rules did not include a category of ‘illegal’ immigration. This chapter traces the shift from this largely permissive immigration regime based on the use of caps and criteria, to the more individualised approach based on illegalisation and individual punishment that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how this new, individualised approach was considered by officials and the Labour government as a necessary response to political expectations, rather than a means of better steering migration. The individualised approach also necessitated - and enabled - new forms of state knowledge of irregular migrants. However, a lack of operational commitment to this approach led to relatively lax implementation, and a residual issue of limited state knowledge of unauthorised migrants.

Most accounts of states and knowledge see knowledge as crucial to realising state governing projects and for underpinning the ‘epistemic authority’ of the state. This chapter questions the underlying assumptions these accounts make about state motivation or rationality. Building on theories of state legitimation, it argues that we should see knowledge production as highly selective and contingent. The chapter then elaborates on the three lenses for exploring ignorance: (a) omission, inspired by theories of bounded rationality and information processing; (b) strategy, building on sociological and anthropological notions of strategic ignorance and (c) ascription, building on theories of social movements and focusing on processes of claims-making and political contestation that expose state ignorance.

This chapter explores the asylum crisis of the 1990s. We examine how officials in Germany and the UK dealt with growing evidence of a sizeable population of irregular migrants by deploying the three main strategies for responding to ignorance: denial, elucidation and resignation. Although both governments pursued forms of denial and resignation, these took different forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their ‘ignorance’, with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating a social problem over which they had limited control.

This chapter charts how irregular migration was first identified in France and the UK as a social problem requiring state intervention. Building on theories of information processing, it explores the filters through which each government scanned their political and operational environment to identify and frame the issue. In the UK, a political preoccupation with limiting overall numbers of Commonwealth migrants led to measures to penalise ‘evasion of control’ in the late 1960s. In France, concerns about 'clandestine work' prompted a focus on irregular labour in 1970s, which built on earlier security priorities tied to the Algerian War. By locating the emergence of the issue in historical and cross-national context, our analysis highlights the contingent and selective nature of state knowledge production about irregular migration.

This introductory chapter sets out the core arguments of the book. It introduces the key concepts and theoretical approach, including state rationality, strategies of knowledge production and state ignorance. It then outlines the three lenses for exploring ignorance: ignorance as omission, ignorance as strategy and ignorance as ascription. Finally, it sets the scene for the empirical analysis, introducing the issue of irregular migrants, and explaining the comparative research design that focuses on three case studies: France, Germany and the UK.

The German state is often presented as an archetypal example of a bureaucratised system of migration surveillance and control. The Central Foreigners Register, introduced in West Germany in 1953 and digitised in 1967, is a central pillar of this infrastructure, and one of the most comprehensive tools of migration control in any liberal democratic state. Through analysis of federal and state records, this chapter reconstructs the challenges of coordination and resources that impeded the effective operation of the register in the post-war years. Nevertheless, despite its operational deficiencies, it has played an important symbolic role in bolstering the self-image of Germany as a modern state with a high capacity to control its population.

In our concluding chapter, we review the evolution of state infrastructures of control. Such infrastructures embody state beliefs about how best to steer migrants, and also provide maps with which states ‘see’ their unauthorised populations. We chart changes in infrastructures since the 1960s across three dimensions: styles, sites and temporalities of control. The analysis highlights the continued reliance on centralised command and control approaches in Germany, despite niggling concerns that they are not capturing the full picture. In France, patchy implementation of work and welfare restrictions, and a sharp left-right divide on the issue, has repeatedly led governments back to the tool of regularisation. In the UK, lack of internal control infrastructure has been compensated for by outsourcing to external organisations, meaning that migrants get ‘caught’ at later stages in their lives when they are most reliant on social and economic support. We explore the implications of these different infrastructures on state knowledge and ignorance.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a phase of increasing intergovernmental cooperation between European countries, culminating in Schengen and EU cooperation on immigration. This sharply exposed the divergence of migration control across European countries, triggering both ‘learning effects’ as countries adapted domestic legislation on asylum and borders, and ‘compensatory effects’ to mitigate the loss of internal Schengen border controls. Yet rather than leading to convergence, national systems of internal migration control remained surprisingly enduring. The chapter shows how the persistence of these divergences made arrangements on Schengen and free movement vulnerable to political shocks such as the 2015 refugee crisis and Brexit.

Regularisation has been part of the French state's policy response to immigration since World War II. Since the end of labour migration in the mid-1970s, one of the key routes to legal immigration in France has been through regularisation by local administrations. These generally discreet practices reveal an intimate knowledge on the part of street-level bureaucrats of this supposedly invisible population. Alongside this generally low-key process, the French state has also organised more visible ‘mass regularisations’, notably in 1981, 1991 and 1998. This chapter explores the political dynamics shaping the French government’s approach to both ‘exceptional’ and ongoing regularisation. Through archival and interview data, it shows how the French authorities at the local and national level developed an array of strategies to manage the visibility of its regularisation policies.

This chapter offers a historical overview of the governance of irregular migration as a key element in the construction of the post-war European state. It explores four moments, each of which represents an evolution of state capacities in relation to the control of (irregular) migration. The first moment is the immediate post-war period, in which large-scale population movement and displacement led to the emergence of a set of legal frameworks that were designed to regulate these social realities at a collective level. The second moment corresponds to the end of the European colonial empires in the 1950s and 1960s, when contests over citizenship, residency and movement rights reshaped the political framework of 'irregularity'. The third moment corresponds to the 'closure' of West European borders in the mid-1970s, after which both regular and irregular migration emerged as a social problem. Finally, the fourth moment runs from the 1990s to the present-day. This period has been characterised by a radicalisation of the politics of immigration, as well as processes of Europeanisation that have sought to monitor individual migrants.

How does a person curious about or wanting to do science learn it? The thesis of this book is learning science requires not only digging deeply into the subject but learning how to learn. It is not enough to learn facts about the history of science or to study chemistry, biology, or physics per se. One must also have a sense of the roles of psychological and social factors in science. We can read about the development of Newtonian mechanics or quantum physics, but that does not tell us why Newton, or Planck, Bohr, Born, or Heisenberg studied these subjects in the first place or what thought processes they used in their work. It does not tell us how their personalities and intuition drove their work. It also does not tell us why the work of these scientists was or was not accepted by the scientific community, rightly or wrongly. Most importantly, it does not tell us why we think we know what we do or even if what we study is real. Epistemology and metaphysics are required here. This chapter explains why such knowledge is obligatory if one is to do science well.

The central message of the introduction is one must understand science if one wants to do science well. This requires a holistic educational approach, one that not only teaches the whats and hows of science, but most critically, it's whys. Why is the sky blue? Why do normal cells turn into cancer cells? Why do we use the scientific method and from where did it come? Why would one want to be a scientist in the first place? Why is science done in the way it is, that is, what is the gestalt of science? The whats and whys of science are practical in nature. The whys, in contrast, encompass theoretical, philosophical, historical, and social underpinnings of science. The whys are particularly important now when the probity and veracity of science are being attacked, and people seek to replace actual facts with "alternative facts" (falsehoods) for political, religious, or economic purposes or out of plain ignorance.

The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.

This chapter summarises the argument of the book. Through a discussion of “Brexit”, it then explores the extent to which arguments about expert ignorance could travel beyond rule of law reform, for instance, to studies of governance more broadly. It also discusses the politics of the methods I have proposed to study expert ignorance.