Agnotology

The three wise monkeys (from left to right: hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil) an icon used by Proctor and Schiebinger in their 2005 conference “Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”.

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and -λογία, -logia. 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's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer 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 are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, 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 was censored and delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.

History

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 work with the colorful rock agate. He connected the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal, 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 witnesses.

Proctor co-organized a pair of events with Londa Schiebinger, his wife, who is also a science history professor: the first was a workshop at the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 titled “Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”, and later a conference at Stanford University in 2005 titled “Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance”.

Political economy

In 2004, Londa Schiebinger, 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 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 to 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. 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 Ferrier 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 science
• Obscurantism
• Politics of global warming:
  • Pressure on scientists
  • Efforts to mislead public
• The Republican War on Science
• Merchants of Doubt
• Doubt is Their Product
• Fear, uncertainty and doubt, or simply 'FUD', a disinformation technique using the appeal to fear
• Fnord
• Subvertising
• The Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes

Further reading

• Michaels, David (2008). Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your health. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530067-3.
• Mooney, Chris (2005). The Republican War on Science. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04676-2.
• Proctor, Robert N. (1995). Cancer Wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about cancer. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00859-9.
• Proctor, Robert N.; Schiebinger, Londa, eds. (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5901-4. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
• Smithson M (1985). "Toward a social theory of ignorance". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 20 (4): 323–346. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1985.tb00049.x.

External links

• Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance
• Agnotology and Misology
• WordSpy citations