naïve

Naïve is an adjective used to describe a person or attitude marked by a lack of experience, sophistication, or critical judgment. It can imply innocence or straightforwardness, but more often carries a negative sense of gullibility or credulity. Naïveté can apply to questions, judgments, or beliefs that are not critically examined, especially when someone accepts information at face value or is untrained in a field.

Origin and spelling: The form comes from French naïf, naïve, which in turn derives from a sense of natural or native. The diaeresis over the i (ï) is sometimes used to indicate that the vowels are pronounced separately; in modern English, naïve is commonly written with the diacritic, though naive is also widely used.

Typical uses include naive art, a term for artwork by self-taught artists who employ direct, simple styles and bright colors. In science and statistics, the Naive Bayes classifier is a family of probabilistic models that assume independence among features; the label naive refers to this simplifying assumption, which is rarely true in practice but often yields effective results. The term can also appear in phrases like naive realism, referring to a belief in a straightforward interpretation of the world.

Related nouns and adverbs include naïveté and naïvely (or naively). The concept is subtle and context-dependent, and care is typically needed to avoid dismissing legitimate perspectives as merely naive.