Definition
In Harari's account, ignorance is not a deficiency but a posture — the willingness of a culture to admit that its inherited scriptures, classics, and authorities do not contain the answers to its most important questions. The Scientific Revolution, he argues, began with that admission. Once a society acknowledges that what is known is partial, the project of finding out becomes possible.
Pre-modern knowledge systems generally treated their canonical texts as already containing the truth. Investigation was therefore exegesis — reading the texts more carefully — rather than inquiry into nature. Modern science inverted the relationship: the texts became starting points, hypotheses to be tested, and the natural world became the higher authority.
Why it matters
How it works
Once a community of inquirers accepts that important things are unknown, the natural next question is how to find them out. That question is what gives rise to the scientific method: hypotheses formulated against evidence, experiments designed to discriminate among rival explanations, results published so that others can check and extend them. The whole methodological apparatus is downstream of the original epistemic admission.
The same posture underwrote modern exploration, mapping, and empire — Europeans set out to chart coastlines and species precisely because they assumed their existing maps and bestiaries were incomplete. Ignorance, taken seriously, is generative.