IGNORISM is the complementary term to denialism. In short, the latter is defined as the pseudo-rational denial of scientific, empirical knowledge.
In contrast to actively acting denialism, IGNORISM behaves passively.
If denialism disputes scientific knowledge according to the definition, then IGNORISM also and above all occurs in the sciences.
For example, the “scientific communities” ignores everything outside of the limits they have set themselves. Or it will ignore results that contradict its own instead of looking for them.
In this way, “scientific communities”, which as a necessary fiction hide a large part of possible information (information reduction), become the dogmatic “communities of ignorance”.
Myths and dogmas are not dissolved, but actively and in almost any quantity newly created. And especially when new technical possibilities, such as fMRT, are developed.
An example would be the behaviorists, and currently all the neuro… directions, be they neuro-economy, neuro-psychoanalysis, etc. (see, among other things, the book by Felix Hasler “Neuromythologie”).
The “pseudo-empiricism” already described by Jaan Valsiner is practiced – and dogmatically represented.
Ignorism can be found above all in the psychology of US American provenance, since the Americans not only declared their independence from the political, but also from the cultural and thus also scientific European roots when they founded their state.
When Valsiner and Toomela – rightly – complain about the lack of perception and consideration of psychology before WW II, this has its origin in the very strong US American influence.
Thus, American psychologists and their international followers keep reinventing psychology, like the proverbial wheel, and ignore the results of their predecessors. Especially if these are not acceptable, such as those by Bowlby and Ainsworth, and by Spiro.
Much of the gender research and gender discussion for example would have been superfluous if Spiro’s classic study were not simply ignored.
This is how a Pipi Longstocking psychology comes about – “I explain the world as I like it”.
It is not just the autism “research” of the last 5 decades that has suffered and continues to suffer from ignorance (the combination of “being able to know” but “not wanting to know”), it is the humanities as a whole.
Even if you just skim through the excerpts provided in the REdition Schmidt, it becomes clear how much knowledge was/is already available and has been deliberately ignored for decades.