Knowing Ignorance

Knowledge and ignorance are closely related concepts.

One thing I’ve found puzzling for many years already is to what degree awareness is also involved.

In my opinion, it seems unfathomable how anyone could know something and at the same time pretend to not know it. Yet followers of Freud apparently consider this to be so commonplace that denying this obvious fact of life seems equally unfathomable.

What I wish to focus on today, however, is not so much a matter of psychology, but simply a matter of defining “ignorance” — what does it actually mean to “ignore” something?

Is it necessary to first become fully aware and conscious of something’s actual existence in order to subsequently deny it and thereby to ignore it?

Or is it possible to (for example) simply “sleep through” something (like a storm that simply blows over and then disappears) and thereby to have never become cognizant of the fact’s existence at all?

Personally, I feel that would not be ignorance per se, but rather something like innocence or simply uninformedness — we can have “no knowledge” of something, and we can also have “no information” about something without being ignorant … or not?

If we know that the moon has a spherical form, and that we only see one side of it from Earth, do we “ignore” the other side? Or if I am aware of the existence of another language (one which I don’t understand), do I ignore everything spoken or written in that language, simply by refusing to learn that language?

If some company can make a pretty penny by tricking some user into clicking on a link, is the user behaving out of ignorance or from some other motivation?