Ignorance and Surprise provides the first comprehensive synthesis of the sociology of ignorance and the sociology of scientific knowledge. In addition to developing a framework for analyzing ignorance and knowledge together, Gross suggests a way of bringing the power of the scientific experiment, which can both encourage and control surprise, into the world of ecological restoration and environmental policy. Given the often disheartening environmental surprises that contemporary society faces, this book is a thoughtful and timely intervention into our thinking about the environment, resilience, and sustainability.
David Hess, author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry
Gross' book is an excellent contribution to the analytical terrain of uncertainty in studies of science-society relations and will bode well for scholars interested in expanded societal membership in the production of knowledge.
Metascience
[A]n excellent historiography of social science philosophies of learning.
International Social Science Review
What kinds of science will help us navigate the Anthropocene? Matthias Gross's book takes an important step toward answering that question.
Science as Culture
A nicely focused approach to joining theory and practice for shaping the environment for human use.
Building Research & Information
Offers an important postnormal model of a science that counters the absolute pronouncements and rhetoric of a traditional science that fears ignorance and surprise, but that at the same time preserves the best parts of the scientific enterprise...Highly recommended.
Choice
Matthias Gross begins his book with the wonderful declaration that 'ignorance and surprise belong together.' He uses the seemingly unlikely but very pertinent domains of landscape design and ecological restoration to illustrate a shift toward what some call postnormal, mode 2, or transdisciplinary science. Drawing on classical as well as contemporary social theorists, he constructs a framework that provides important insights into current debates about irreducible ignorance and surprise, and yields an enticing vision of a new kind of inclusive public experimentation.
Michael Smithson, Department of Psychology, The Australian National University, author of Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms
Matthias Gross is in the business of rewriting modernity. Far from being a prescription for paralysis, not knowing becomes, in his telling, a springboard for wider participation, experimentation, and creativity. Part science studies and part environmental sociology, this is a hugely optimistic and intelligent book for anyone who finds the contemporary world too complex to govern.
Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
