Ignorance - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ignorance is a state of being uninformed (lack of knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

). The word ignorant is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware

Awareness

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of...

and is often used as an insult. Ignoramus is commonly used in the US, the UK, and Ireland as a name of someone who is willfully ignorant.

Ignorance is distinguished from stupidity

Stupidity

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit, or sense. It may be innate, assumed, or reactive - 'being "stupid with grief" as a defence against trauma', a state marked with 'grief and despair...making even simple daily tasks a hardship'....

, although both can lead to "unwise

Wisdom

Wisdom is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions in keeping with this understanding. It often requires control of one's emotional reactions so that universal principles, reason and...

" acts.

Writer Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

articulated about the scope and structure of one's ignorance: "Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map.