ABSTRACT

The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has had far-reaching effects on public health around the world. Attempts to prevent the spread of the disease by quarantine have led to large-scale global socioeconomic disruption. During the outbreak, public authorities and politicians have struggled with how to manage widespread ignorance regarding the virus. Drawing on insights from social epistemology and the emerging interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies, this article provides evidence that the temporality of non-knowing and its intersection with knowing is a force that leads political decision-making during a crisis. Illuminating the epistemic analysis with statements given by the Finnish government to the media in decision-making documents and in press conferences, this paper proposes that a crisis situation, itself, seems to demand from political decision-makers dynamic action while simultaneously knowing little (‘non-knowing’) about the different fronts of tackling the pandemic. We conclude that non-knowing must be recognized explicitly as an enduring and central condition in decision-making, which we call ‘epistemic humility.’

摘要

新型冠状病毒大流行（COVID-19）对世界各地的公共卫生产生了深远的影响。尝试通过隔离来预防疾病的传播已导致大规模的全球社会经济破坏。在疫情爆发期间，公共当局和政客们一直在努力应对如何广泛了解有关该病毒的无知。本文利用社会认识论和新兴的无知研究的跨学科领域的见识，提供了证据，即不知道的时间性及其与知识的交叉是导致危机期间政治决策的力量。本文以芬兰政府在决策文件和新闻发布会上对媒体的发言作为对认知分析的解释，提出了危机局势本身，政治决策者似乎要求采取动态行动，同时对解决大流行的不同方面知之甚少（“不知道”）。我们得出结论，不知情必须被明确地识别为决策中的持久和核心条件，我们称其为“流行的谦卑”。