Here are 100 books that Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies fans have personally recommended if you like
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies.
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I am a historian by training and have spent my career of nearly forty years studying human violence, and economic change and development. This has brought me to many dark places, to the human capacity to destroy. But all this work has also brought me to the study of those who resisted, all the people who envisioned different ways of being in the world, different futures. I have written many books on these topics. My latest, The Killing Age, is in many respects the summation of work I have been doing since the early 1980s.
I love this clear-eyed exposé of the rise of climate denialism and the harms of tobacco smoke.
At a time when these issues are at the forefront of public attention and public health is under threat, I loved the way the authors coolly exposed the making and marketing of fake science.
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve spent my career studying the paradox that low-risk investing can lead to high returns. As an author and a multi-billion-dollar fund manager, I’ve seen firsthand how markets reward patience, discipline, and avoiding unnecessary risks. These books shaped my thinking—challenging conventional wisdom, deepening my understanding of risk, and reinforcing why defensive investing works. I love uncovering ideas that go against the grain, especially when they’re backed by data. Whether you’re an investor or just fascinated by how we make decisions under uncertainty, these books will change the way you see markets—and maybe even the way you invest.
Risk is the invisible force that shapes our world, yet few books capture its history and significance as brilliantly as this one. When I first read this book, I was struck by how Bernstein connects probability theory, human psychology, and investing into one seamless narrative. It made me realize that mastering risk isn’t just about crunching numbers—it’s about understanding human nature.
From Pascal and Gauss to modern finance, this book reveals how we’ve learned to tame uncertainty. As an investor, it reinforced my belief that risk isn’t something to fear but to understand and use wisely.
A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable ...an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." -The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." -The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book ...Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." -Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." -The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." -Worth "No one…
My interest in ignorance and uncertainty was sparked when I was an undergraduate mathematics student. I was taking my first courses in probability and then reading about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, realizing that even mathematics contains untamed unknowns. Later, as a PhD student in sociology I read theories about how knowledge is socially constructed, the foundation of the “sociology of knowledge”. I wondered why there wasn’t also a “sociology of ignorance”. That ignited my interest, and the social construction of ignorance became my life-long research topic. I have since seen it grow from my solo efforts in the 1980s to a flourishing multidisciplinary topic of research and public debate.
If you’d like to take a relatively straightforward but sophisticated tour through ignorance, this book is for you.
Frankly, it’s a book I would like to have written. The author is a philosopher and I’m not, so his viewpoint and voice differ from mine, but his book echoes, parallels, and expands my own work and a host of others’ writings on ignorance. DeNicola uses four engaging metaphors as vehicles for his tour: ignorance as a place, a boundary, a limit, and a horizon.
His treatment of ignorance nicely avoids the usual negative bias against it. Like me, he recognizes that ignorance has its uses and even can be beneficial or virtuous. And his footnotes and bibliography provide plenty of material if you want to find out more.
An exploration of what we can know about what we don't know: why ignorance is more than simply a lack of knowledge.
Ignorance is trending. Politicians boast, “I'm not a scientist.” Angry citizens object to a proposed state motto because it is in Latin, and “This is America, not Mexico or Latin America.” Lack of experience, not expertise, becomes a credential. Fake news and repeated falsehoods are accepted and shape firm belief. Ignorance about American government and history is so alarming that the ideal of an informed citizenry now seems quaint. Conspiracy theories and false knowledge thrive. This may be…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My interest in ignorance and uncertainty was sparked when I was an undergraduate mathematics student. I was taking my first courses in probability and then reading about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, realizing that even mathematics contains untamed unknowns. Later, as a PhD student in sociology I read theories about how knowledge is socially constructed, the foundation of the “sociology of knowledge”. I wondered why there wasn’t also a “sociology of ignorance”. That ignited my interest, and the social construction of ignorance became my life-long research topic. I have since seen it grow from my solo efforts in the 1980s to a flourishing multidisciplinary topic of research and public debate.
Don’t be misled by the title: this book will not reassure you that other people resist what you and I know are obvious facts because they’re stupid or irrational.
We all resist and reject knowledge of various kinds, and this book is a thoughtful investigation into the sociocultural, political, psychological, and biological influences behind that. Klintman’s multi-disciplinary inclusiveness is a refreshing antidote to conventional single-discipline writing on this topic.
Another aspect of this book dear to my heart is his willingness to examine evidence pointing to the benefits as well as the drawbacks of knowledge resistance, including writings on “rational ignorance”. That said, he also squarely addresses the question of what to do when knowledge resistance causes harm, and why the answer is not simply “more education”.
Why do people and groups ignore, deny and resist knowledge about society's many problems? In a world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news' that some believe could be remedied by 'factfulness', the question has never been more pressing. After years of ideologically polarised debates on the topic, this book seeks to further advance our understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge resistance by integrating insights from the social, economic and evolutionary sciences. It identifies simplistic views in public and scholarly debates about what facts, knowledge and human motivations are and what 'rational' use of information actually means. The examples used include controversies…
Corey Anton is Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University, Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics, Past President of the Media Ecology Association, and a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute. He is an award-winning teacher and author. His research spans the fields of media ecology, semiotics, phenomenology, stoicism, death studies, the philosophy of communication, and multidisciplinary communication theory.
Gregory Bateson, an intellectual maverick, had an evolutionary rule named after him when he was a teenager, (his father was a famed geneticist), was the formulator, along with Jurgen Ruesch, of the double-bind hypothesis of schizophrenia, and was a pioneer in the field of mammalian communication. Given its wide range of address to issues within evolutionary biology, psychiatry, anthropology, systems theory, cybernetics, and communication theory, this is a classic “must read” collection of short essays. Bateson’s unrelentingly original and provocative analyses provoke thought and defy any easy categorization. At the very least, he shows how mammalian play, as multileveled interaction, paves the way for the evolution of human language, and also, how human interaction, with its multiple logical types and different kinds of learning, occurs at various levels of abstraction.
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.
"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of…
Frank R. Kardes, Ph.D. is the Donald E. Weston Professor of Marketing and Distinguished Research Professor at the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and a Fellow of five national professional societies. His research focuses on omission neglect, consumer judgment, and inference processes, persuasion and advertising, and consumer and managerial decision making. He was Co-Editor of Advances in Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Handbook of Consumer Psychology, and Marketing Letters, and serves or has served on seven editorial boards. He has published nine books and over 100 articles and chapters on consumer psychology.
This book focuses on the psychology of decision making, but is highly relevant to consumer decision making. Humankind’s greatest strength is the ability to share knowledge. However, one side effect of this strength is the inability to distinguish between what one knows and what others know. This can lead to a surprisingly large array of decision-making biases and errors. Most of these errors pertain to the overestimation of how much one knows about a topic and the overconfidence that results.
Human reasoning is remarkably shallow - in fact, our thinking and justifications just scratch the surface of the true complexity of the issues we deal with. The ability to think may still be the greatest wonder in the world (and beyond), but the way that individuals think is less than ideal. In The Knowledge Illusion, Sloman and Fernbach show that our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge that is stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere, be it in our bodies, in the environment…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
At age sixteen, I traveled from Pennsylvania to Alaska’s wilderness to live for three months. I took Einstein’s book on relativity. My mind swirled and expanded. The next year, I wrote a paper for high school titled My Universe in Four Realities. Seven years later, I read Julian Jaynes’ book on consciousness. The epiphanies rolled in. The reality we’re taught to believe in always rang false to me. When I learned the inside tricks lawmakers use to stop Americans from blocking environmentally harmful industrial actions, I wrote a book about it. I’m passionate about exposing deceit, whether cultural or legal. These books helped.
I have always suspected that the bubble of customs and dogmas, traditions and institutions that wrapped around my life and claimed it for its own from my earliest days did so to hide some bigger truth under an avalanche of “received truths” that, for me anyway, rang flat and hollow. Brands and logos, ideologies and faiths, rules and consequences–they all seemed contrived in some way and not connected to a reality beyond society’s insistence on their reality.
When I read Berger and Luckman’s book many years ago, it made a deep impression that has remained tattooed on my psyche ever since. I cannot recommend this book too highly!
A general and systematic account of the role of knowledge in society aimed to stimulate both critical discussion and empirical investigations.
This book is concerned with the sociology of 'everything that passes for knowledge in society'. It focuses particularly on that 'common-sense knowledge' which constitutes the reality of everyday life for the ordinary member of society.
The authors are concerned to present an analysis of knowledge in everyday life in the context of a theory of society as a dialectical process between objective and subjective reality. Their development of a theory of institutions, legitimations and socializations has implications beyond the…
I’ve been a soldier, designer, educator, farmer, and remain a philosopher and writer. I defy the classification of being either practical or theoretic. I have worked on environmental issues for over thirty years, including urban, post-conflict, and climate change projects in Australia, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. I have written over twenty books on design, cities, conflict, and politics. I am driven to understand the complexity of the world in which I live and, thereafter, act based on the knowledge gained–my book list reflects this passion for knowledge, and my life evidences a commitment to act.
For me, Bernard Stiegler was one of the most influential thinkers of technology of the modern age. I like books that bring my own thinking into question. His book does this for me by providing an interesting and unfamiliar way of understanding the relation between technology and consumerism.
He describes consumerism as damaging our psychic sphere and destroying our desires–replacing them with ones formed and met by marketed commodities. What I found insightful was how he showed “reason” being transformed by philosophy into an object of faith.
The result: reason now travels with the unreason of an unchecked rationalization of power of technological creation, but with little sense of the consequences, over time, of what has been created (think AI!).
In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.
New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be…
My love for ideas and their history was born when I was still in high school. It was my old English teacher who first opened up the power of ideas in literature to change the world. I’m pretty sure he loved Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Whether or not that’s true, my taste was further sharpened when I took a two-year course on the history of thought about nature and culture as an undergraduate student. I was captivated.
What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.
What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?
How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? This study engages these universal questions through a recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in 17th-century England. The author paints a picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honour, and integrity. These codes…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
I found incredibly compelling the argument of how important humility and the willingness to admit what we don’t know are to democratic, liberal thought.
That we have become a society that rarely listens to ideas that challenge our own or that disrupt what we think we know to be true–is hugely dangerous.
As Lynch explores, more information has not led to greater certainty or confidence in the answers we find. What we are experiencing is not only a crisis of truth, but one of trust.
Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet-where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them-has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance." In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.
Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell…
