ABSTRACT
The modern form of ontology is transcendental philosophy which becomes epistemology. Ignorance is not so much a pejorative term as a condition of the relation between a finite organism (however biologically, socially or culturally extended) and a potentially infinite (though actually an extended) set of spatio-temporal possibilities. Ignorance-attention is intended here as something practised, something organised, something structurally coupled, in the very being of a species, a paradigm, a culture, a technology. Kierkegaard calls Socrates' position, the standpoint of irony. The standpoint of pragmatism operates in reverse. It has maximum viability where cause-effect relationships can be isolated, so that the issues of 'all' human representation has (at least) less relevance. The strategic ignorance of this pragmatic standpoint, then, relates to the circumscription of the highly specific phenomenon as something that can be 'safely' regarded as having trivial connectedness with its environment. The traditional polarities of sociology, critical deconstructionism and so-called 'positivism', reflect the problematics.
