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Ignorance has been both vilified and celebrated throughout the ages. However, the social sciences have had little to say about this topic over the years. In this paper, we argue that in an age of competing and contrasting worldviews, scholarly attention to ignorance can shed light on interpersonal processes and relational dynamics that occur in encounters between subjects holding different points of view. We discuss data from two studies documenting an attribution of ignorance in social relations that serves to relegate the other's point of view to one that stands in need of education or correction. We argue that this communicative strategy enacts a semantic barrier that serves to retain the interlocutor's original point of view unscathed and unchallenged. We argue that this limits dialogical relations by eliminating the requirement for perspective-taking in social dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation and change of social knowledge in Modern Turkish Republic has begun with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst the transformation of knowledge took place in daily knowledge, the change that took place in the political structures had a broad influence in the language, religion and tradition. The appearance of a new form of daily knowledge created a new common sense and this has opened the road towards the possibility of investigating social representations of various phenomena. Among these the social representations of madness in daily knowledge have already existed in common sense knowledge for a long time. With this in mind, the main goal of this paper is to explore contemporary urban Turkish social representations of madness. This study has shown that both scientific and common sense knowledge exist at present in citizens’ daily knowledge and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]