What is Nescience?
Have you ever thought to ask- what's out there that I don't think, to think about?
In simple terms, Nescience is the lack of knowledge or awareness about something. Merriam-Webster even goes so far as to define it as ignorance. However, I believe we need to remove negative interpretation and use its meaning to our advantage.
Nescience definition
For practical purposes, nescience is the unknowingness of something, something which we don’t think to question in the first place. For example, did you know there's a word used to describe the process of naming things? It's called nomenclature, and it's very much a real thing. If you’ve never heard of the term nomenclature before, and are just now finding out about it, that's due to nescience. Did you even think to ask the question of how words gain their meaning? Until someone told you about it, you may have not even considered it.
This is just one example of nescience, one that obviously is not effective if you already knew what nomenclature means. But there are many things out there we don’t know, and knowledge that one person has and someone else doesn't. So in some regards, nescience gives us the opportunity to learn more about the world. Typically, these learning experiences are found at the edges of our comfort zone, oh joy!
We must never assume that we know everything there is to know
Imagine that you and everyone else on this planet has a giant cloud above their head. This is a cloud of nescience, and it represents all the things we do not yet know, nor understand how to ask questions about. Of course, everyones cloud is a different size, based on their personal experiences. One of our missions in life is to reduce the size of our own clouds, by learning new things from others and the world around us.
It's also important to note that from an educational standpoint, nescience is a powerful argument for why students should stay in school and not drop out. Without being exposed to a variety of topics, students may never discover their passion. Do you think all students know that they can merge their PDFs together with a free online software, to simplify their workflow? Probably not. Take time today to go out of your way to learn something new, and decrease the size of your nescience cloud. You owe it to yourself and the world to be informed and educated.
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Aleksey Weyman
Aleksey Weyman is a web designer, music artist and creator of Millennial Moderator.
