About: Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

This character is too ignorant to realize that he is ignorant. He has so little power and knowledge that he has nothing to compare with, and thus grossly overestimate his own power, knowledge and importance. Likely to live in a Small Secluded World or be saturated in Paranoia Fuel... or both. Children and animals are normally excused from this trope. They can be included in special cases when their "ignorance of ignorance" is highlighted rather then simply a part of who they are — or when they have powers way beyond their maturity, so that their lack of understanding becomes a problem.

AttributesValues
rdfs:label
  • Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance
rdfs:comment
  • This character is too ignorant to realize that he is ignorant. He has so little power and knowledge that he has nothing to compare with, and thus grossly overestimate his own power, knowledge and importance. Likely to live in a Small Secluded World or be saturated in Paranoia Fuel... or both. Children and animals are normally excused from this trope. They can be included in special cases when their "ignorance of ignorance" is highlighted rather then simply a part of who they are — or when they have powers way beyond their maturity, so that their lack of understanding becomes a problem.
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:all-the-tro...iPageUsesTemplate
dbkwik:allthetrope...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • This character is too ignorant to realize that he is ignorant. He has so little power and knowledge that he has nothing to compare with, and thus grossly overestimate his own power, knowledge and importance. Likely to live in a Small Secluded World or be saturated in Paranoia Fuel... or both. A character who is characterized this way is sometimes refered to as a "King of Pointland", after an old example of this trope. Pointland in the novel Flatland is not a kingdom at all, it is just a dimensionless spot of nothingness. Its only inhabitant is "king" by default since he is totally alone. He has no width, no height, no depth (neither literally nor metaphorically), no power or knowledge, and since he has nothing to compare with himself, he believes himself to be omnipotent. Children and animals are normally excused from this trope. They can be included in special cases when their "ignorance of ignorance" is highlighted rather then simply a part of who they are — or when they have powers way beyond their maturity, so that their lack of understanding becomes a problem. Characters who are merely Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance are very different from characters such as a Ted Baxter or a Heteronormative Crusader. While a Ted Baxter is narcissistically full of himself and a Heteronormative Crusader is self-righteously narrow-minded, an Ignorant character is merely naive and doesn't know any better. While ultimately innocent, he might still be a villain — often one who is tricked by smarter villains, and thus relatively easy for the heroes to turn against their master by using their incomprehensible yet efficient powers. Compare Outside Context Villain, who exploits ignorance of even his potential existence. As That Other Wiki can tell you, in Real Life Psychology it's known as illusory superiority. See also Know-Nothing Know-It-All. Examples of Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance include:
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software