Agnotology
Encyclopedia
Robert N. Proctor
Robert Neel Proctor is an American historian of science and Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. While a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University in 1999, he became the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry.At Pennsylvania State...
,
a Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
professor specializing in the history of science and technology.
Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word , agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek
Attic Greek
Attic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek". It is sometimes included in Ionic.- Origin and range...
ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and , -logia
-logy
-logy is a suffix in the English language, used with words originally adapted from Ancient Greek language ending in -λογία...
. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.
A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry
Tobacco industry
The tobacco industry comprises those persons and companies engaged in the growth, preparation for sale, shipment, advertisement, and distribution of tobacco and tobacco-related products. It is a global industry; tobacco can grow in any warm, moist environment, which means it can be farmed on all...
's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.
Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance
Ignorance
Ignorance is a state of being uninformed . The word ignorant is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware and is often used as an insult...
are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy
Secrecy
Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups, perhaps while sharing it with other individuals...
and suppression
Suppression
The term suppression may refer to:* Oppression, the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner, also an act or instance of oppressing...
, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.
Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not "come to be," or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics
Plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere...
was censored
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
and delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information
Classified information
Classified information is sensitive information to which access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of persons. A formal security clearance is required to handle classified documents or access classified data. The clearance process requires a satisfactory background investigation...
related to underseas warfare
Submarine warfare
Naval warfare is divided into three operational areas: surface warfare, air warfare and underwater warfare. The latter may be subdivided into submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare as well as mine warfare and mine countermeasures...
.
Origins
The term "agnotology" was first coined in a footnote in Proctor's 1995 book, "The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer": “Historians and philosophers of science have tended to treat ignorance as an ever-expanding vacuum into which knowledge is sucked – or even, as Johannes Kepler once put it, as the mother who must die for science to be born. Ignorance, though, is more complex than this. It has a distinct and changing political geography that is often an excellent indicator of the politics of knowledge. We need a political agnotology to compliment our political epistemologies.”Proctor was quoted using the term to describe his research "only half jokingly," as "agnotology" in a 2001 interview about his lapidary
Lapidary
A lapidary is an artist or artisan who forms stone, mineral, gemstones, and other suitably durable materials into decorative items such as engraved gems, including cameos, or cabochons, and faceted designs...
work with the colorful rock agate
Agate
Agate is a microcrystalline variety of silica, chiefly chalcedony, characterised by its fineness of grain and brightness of color. Although agates may be found in various kinds of rock, they are classically associated with volcanic rocks and can be common in certain metamorphic rocks.-Etymology...
. He connected the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus
Theophrastus
Theophrastus , a Greek native of Eresos in Lesbos, was the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He came to Athens at a young age, and initially studied in Plato's school. After Plato's death he attached himself to Aristotle. Aristotle bequeathed to Theophrastus his writings, and...
in 300 BC
300 BC
Year 300 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Corvus and Pansa...
, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamond
Diamond
In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...
s, asbestos
Asbestos
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring silicate minerals used commercially for their desirable physical properties. They all have in common their eponymous, asbestiform habit: long, thin fibrous crystals...
, granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
, and coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
, all of which have much higher commercial value. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest," the same "structured apathy" he called "the social construction of ignorance."
He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 New York Times story on medical historians testifying as expert witness
Expert witness
An expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...
es.
Proctor co-organized a pair of events with Londa Schiebinger
Londa Schiebinger
Londa Schiebinger is a historian of science specialising in research on the relationship between gender and science. She is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.She...
, his wife, who is also a science history professor: the first was a workshop at the Pennsylvania State University
Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State or PSU, is a public research university with campuses and facilities throughout the state of Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855, the university has a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service...
in 2003 titled “Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”, and later a conference at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 2005 titled “Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”.
Political economy
In 2004, Londa SchiebingerLonda Schiebinger
Londa Schiebinger is a historian of science specialising in research on the relationship between gender and science. She is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.She...
,
gave a more precise definition of agnotology in a paper on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, and contrasted it with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how we know while the former questions why we do not know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."
Its use as a critical description of the political economy has been expanded upon by Michael Betancourt
Michael Betancourt
Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the technologies of visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures....
in a 2010 article titled "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism." His analysis is focused on the housing bubble as well as the bubble economy of the period from 1980-2008. Betancourt argues that this political economy should be termed "agnotologic capitalism" because the systemic production and maintenance of ignorance is a major feature that enables the economy in his analysis to function because it enables the creation of a "bubble economy".
Betancourt's argument is posed in relation to the idea of affective labor
Affective labor
Affective Labor is a term identifying work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. Coming out of Autonomist Feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by Antonio Negri and Michael...
. He states that "The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of reality -- the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage -- contentious and a source of confusion, reflected by the inability of participants in bubbles to be aware of the immanent collapse until after it has happened. The biopolitical paradigm of distraction, what [Juan Martin] Prada calls "life to enjoy," can only be maintained if the underlying strictures remain hidden from view. If affective labor works to reduce alienation, agnotology works to eliminate the potential for dissent." In his view, the role of affective labor is to enable the continuation of the agnotologic effects that enable the maintenance of the capitalist status quo.
Agnoiology
A similar word from the same Greek roots, agnoiology, meaning "the science or study of ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions" or "the doctrine concerning those things of which we are necessarily ignorant" describes a branch of philosophy studied by James Frederick FerrierJames Frederick Ferrier
James Frederick Ferrier was a Scottish metaphysical writer. He introduced the term epistemology.-Education and early writings:Ferrier was born in Edinburgh, the son of John Ferrier, writer to the signet...
in the 19th century.
Media influence
The availability of such large amounts of knowledge in this information age may not necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry. Instead it may be allowing many people to cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs.and to be distracted from new knowledge by repetitive or base entertainments. There is conflicting evidence on how television viewing affects intelligence as well as values formation.
An emerging new scientific discipline that has connections to agnotology is cognitronics:
cognitronics : aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields... Cognitronics is studying and looking for the ways of improving cognitive mechanisms of processing information and developing emotional sphere of the personality - the ways aiming at compensating three mentioned shifts in the systems of values and, as an indirect consequence, for the ways of developing symbolic information processing skills of the learners, linguistic mechanisms, associative and reasoning abilities, broad mental outlook being important preconditions of successful work practically in every sphere of professional activity in information society.
See also
- Junk scienceJunk scienceJunk science is a term used in U.S. political and legal disputes that brands an advocate's claims about scientific data, research, or analyses as spurious. The term may convey a pejorative connotation that the advocate is driven by political, ideological, financial, or other unscientific...
- ObscurantismObscurantismObscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the...
- Politics of global warmingPolitics of global warmingThe politics of global warming have involved corporate lobbying, funding of special interest groups and public relations campaigns by the oil and coal industries which have affected policy decisions and legislation worldwide...
:- Pressure on scientists
- Efforts to mislead public
- The Republican War on ScienceThe Republican War on ScienceThe Republican War on Science is a book by Chris C. Mooney, an American journalist who focuses on the politics of science policy. In the book, Mooney discusses the Republican Party leadership's stance on science, and in particular that of the George W...
- Merchants of DoubtMerchants of DoubtMerchants of Doubt is a 2010 book by the American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels between the climate change debate and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer...
- Doubt is Their ProductDoubt is Their ProductDoubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health is a 2008 book by David Michaels, published by Oxford University Press....
- Fear, uncertainty and doubtFear, uncertainty and doubtFear, uncertainty and doubt, frequently abbreviated as FUD, is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda....
, or simply 'FUD', a disinformationDisinformationDisinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth...
technique using the appeal to fearAppeal to fearAn appeal to fear is a fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for an idea by using deception and propaganda in attempts to increase fear and prejudice toward a competitor. The appeal to fear is common in marketing and politics... - FnordFnordFnord is the typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy....
- SubvertisingSubvertisingSubvertising is a portmanteau of subvert and advertising. It refers to the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. Subvertisements may take the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image or icon, often in a satirical manner...