In your opinion, what is the difference between ignorance and naivete'?

Being naive means lacking experience while being ignorant means lacking knowledge.

IMHO,
Ignorant——choosing to be closed minded
Naive——not knowing they lack the knowledge

To me, someone is naive if they haven’t realized that there is another point of view on an issue. Someone is ignorant if they know there’s another point of view but choose to ignore or discredit it with no scientific or logical basis for the discrediting.

Like they said.

I really dislike the semantic shift behind the popular use of the word ignorant to mean willingly ignorant and to have a strictly pejorative meaning.

strange question, by the way.

Ignorance is choosing to ignore opposing facts simply to protect your own ego or comfort.

Naivete is when you simply don’t have enough facts to work with.

A naive person doesn’t know but would be open to knowing in the future.
An ignorant person knows they don’t know, doesn’t want to know and thinks they know better anyway.

ignorance is not a bad thing, in my opinion, it just means the person is not educated on a certain subject. i’m ignorant to many things…i’m willing to learn though.
naive means someone is more lacking in wisdom and experience.

“Naivete” implies that the person doesn’t understand a situation in all of its complexity. There are dimensions of which he isn’t aware, which leads to oversimplifications. It’s associated with childishness and innocence, blindness to the darker aspects of reality. It isn’t generally considered a moral flaw.

“Ignorance”, as commonly used, has a more negative moral connotation. It too is a failure to see the whole picture, but the ignorant fill in the blanks of their knowledge with fabrications, so that their view is less an oversimplification of reality than a twisted distortion.

Allowing oneself to be drawn into a fraudulent investment scheme would be a good example of naivete. The victim is blind to the darker dimension of the situation, and enters the affair with childlike trust. We don’t think he is a bad person; he’s more a danger to himself than to others.

A white supremacist would be a good model of ignorance. Lacking an accurate understanding of race, he constructs (or adopts) a pseudo-scientific fantasy of a hierarchy of race, which is not an oversimplification; it’s just fallacious. This misconception leads him to act in ways that are harmful to others, and so there is a negative moral dimension to his ignorance.

naïveté: “I don’t know”

ignorance: “I don’t want to know”

I don’t think that either is really aware that they don’t know. Both assume they do.

Knowing that you don’t know is the beginning of wisdom.

Being naive is not knowing any better.
Being ignorant is knowing and not caring.

@Ria777 Funny to see you arguing against semantics…

Naive is cute.

Ignorant is not.

An example of what I mean: an underprivileged person who’s grown into adulthood unable to read. It’s not his fault. He didn’t choose to be ignorant. He just is. And it’s an ugly thing that everyone wants to fix. The person is fine. The person is good. But the existence of such ignorance is something everyone knows needs to be addressed.

@robmandu I would certainly agree with your assessment that naive is cute and that ignorant is not because naivete denotes gullibility or childlike openness whereas ignorance denotes the lack of knowledge or learning .

so where does stupid figure into this? I always thought ignorant meant you didn’t know, because you lacked the knowledge, and stupid meant you have been shown the knowledge, but refuse to accept it.

I think “stupid” implies that the person in question lacks intelligence. As in, they can’t learn, even if they do try. The ignorant don’t try. The naive don’t know that they should try.