Abstract

Research on the concept of “ignorance” and its societal and epistemic status has been going on for some years now in philosophy, sociology and psychology as well as in communication and media studies (cf. the present Handbook with nearly all the major contributors to this research to date). ¹ Somewhat surprisingly, linguistics scholars have not been among the front-runners in this field, despite the fact that it lends itself to a linguistic approach: “It is difficult to communicate clearly about uncertainty, and even more difficult to find out very much about it. However, it is not so difficult to find out how people talk about uncertainty, what they think it is, and how they deal with it” (Smithson 2008: 13).