Agnotology

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Having called conclusions about human-caused climate change "alarmist" contrary to the scientific consensus on climate change, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe displayed a snowball--in winter--as evidence the globe was not warming --in a year that was found to be Earth's warmest to date. The director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies distinguished local weather in a single location in a single week from global climate change. Inhofe holding snowball.jpg
Having called conclusions about human-caused climate change "alarmist" contrary to the scientific consensus on climate change, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe displayed a snowball—in winter—as evidence the globe was not warming —in a year that was found to be Earth's warmest to date. The director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies distinguished local weather in a single location in a single week from global climate change.

Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data (disinformation). [5] [6] More generally, the term includes the condition where more knowledge of a subject creates greater uncertainty.

Contents

Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor cites the tobacco industry's public relations campaign to manufacture doubt about the adverse health effects of tobacco use as a prime example. [7] [8] David Dunning of Cornell University warns that powerful interests exploit the internet to "propagate ignorance". [6]

Agents of culturally induced ignorance include the media, corporations, and government agencies, through secrecy and suppression of information, document destruction, and selective memory. [9] Passive causes include structural information bubbles, including those that reflect racial and class differences, based on access to information.

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse knowledge does not "come to be", or is ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was censored and delayed for at least a decade because some evidence remained classified military information related to undersea warfare. [7]

The availability of large amounts of knowledge may allow people to cherry-pick information (whether or not factual) that reinforces their beliefs [10] and ignore inconvenient knowledge by consuming repetitive or fact-free entertainment. Evidence conflicts on how television affects viewers. [11]

Origins

     There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that
     "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

Isaac Asimov, 1980 [12]

The term was coined in 1992 by linguist and social historian Iain Boal [13] [5] [14] [15] at the request of Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor. [16] The word is based on the Neoclassical Greek word agnōsis (ἄγνωσις, 'not knowing'; cf. Attic Greek ἄγνωτος , 'unknown' and -logia (-λογία). [7]

The term "agnotology" first appeared in print in a footnote in Stanford University professor 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 complement our political epistemologies. [17]

In a 2001 interview about his lapidary work with agate, Proctor used the term to describe his research "only half jokingly" as "agnotology". He connected the 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. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest," the same "structured apathy" he called "the social construction of ignorance". [18]

He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 The New York Times story on medical historians who testify as expert witnesses. [19]

In 2004, Londa Schiebinger [20] claimed that agnotology questions why humans donot know important information and that it could be an "outcome of cultural and political struggle". [21]

In 2004, Schiebinger offered a more precise definition in a paper on 18th-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, [20] and contrasted it with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how humans know while the former questions why humans donot know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle." [21]

Proctor co-organized events with Schiebinger, his wife and fellow professor of science history. [22] [9] In 2008, they published an anthology entitled Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which "provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about 'how we know' to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know?" They locate agnotology within the field of epistemology. [23]

Examples

Some other examples offered by Proctor include Nakba education in the United States [24] and Penn State as an official United States Marine Corps university. [24]

The fossil fuel industry used the technique in its campaign against the scientific consensus on climate change. It became the focus of the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. [25] Oil companies paid teams of scientists to downplay its effects. [26]

Michael Betancourt used agnotology in a critical assessment of political economy in a 2010 article and book. [27] [28] His analysis focused on the housing bubble as well as the 1980 to 2008 period. Betancourt argued that this political economy should be termed "agnotologic capitalism", claiming that the systematic production and maintenance of ignorance enabled a "bubble economy" that allowed the economy to function. [20] In his view, the role of affective labor is to create/maintain agnotologic views that enable the maintenance of the capitalist status quo. This is done by proffering counters to every fact, creating contention and confusion that is difficult to resolve. This confusion reduces dissent by deenergizing its motivating alienation and thus its potential to address weaknesses that may trigger collapse. [27]

Agnoiology

From the same Greek roots, agnoiology refers either to "the science or study of ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions" [29] or "the doctrine concerning those things of which we are necessarily ignorant," [30] describing a branch of philosophy studied by James Frederick Ferrier in the 19th century. [31]

Ainigmology

Anthropologist Glenn Stone points out that some examples of agnotology (such as work promoting tobacco use) do not actually create a lack of knowledge so much as they create confusion. As a more accurate term Stone suggested "ainigmology", from the Greek root ainigma (as in 'enigma'), referring to riddles or to language that obscures the true meaning of a story. [32]

Cognitronics

An emerging scientific discipline that connects to agnotology is cognitronics, [33] [34] which aims to explain distortions in perception caused by the information society and globalization and cope with these distortions. [34]

Unknowledge

Irvin C. Schick distinguishes unknowledge from ignorance, using the example of "terra incognita" in early maps in which mapmakers marked unexplored territories with that or similar labels, which provided "potential objects of Western political and economic attention." [35]

See also

Related Research Articles

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in contemporary epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:

Junk science is spurious or fraudulent scientific data, research, or analysis. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political, ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of knowledge</span> Field of study

The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought, the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology. Instead, it deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world. The sociology of knowledge has a subclass and a complement. Its subclass is sociology of scientific knowledge. Its complement is the sociology of ignorance.

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An explanation is a set of statements usually constructed to describe a set of facts that clarifies the causes, context, and consequences of those facts. It may establish rules or laws, and clarifies the existing rules or laws in relation to any objects or phenomena examined.

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge or understanding. Deliberate ignorance is a culturally-induced phenomenon, the study of which is called agnotology.

Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of scientific knowledge</span> Study of science as a social activity

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises.

Standpoint theory, also known as standpoint epistemology, is a foundational framework in social theory that examines how individuals' unique perspectives, shaped by their social and political experiences, influence their understanding of the world. Standpoint theory proposes that authority is rooted in individuals' personal knowledge and perspectives and the power that such authority exerts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Londa Schiebinger</span> American historian (born 1952)

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender and intersectionality in science, technology, and medicine, she is the founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and from Universitat de València, Spain (2018). She was the first woman in the field of History to win the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1999.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert N. Proctor</span> American historian of science

Robert Neel Proctor is an American historian of science and Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University, where he is also Professor by courtesy of Pulmonary Medicine. 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.

Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of technics and the commons, based as an independent scholar in Berkeley, California and London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of science</span> Critical observation of science

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<i>Merchants of Doubt</i> 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels between the global warming controversy and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer. Oreskes and Conway write that in each case "keeping the controversy alive" by spreading doubt and confusion after a scientific consensus had been reached was the basic strategy of those opposing action. In particular, they show that Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific consensus on many contemporary issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart Firestein</span> American biologist

Stuart J. Firestein is the chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his laboratory is researching the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron. He has published articles in Wired magazine, Huffington Post, and Scientific American. Firestein has been elected as a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his meritorious efforts to advance science. He is an adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for the Public Understanding of Science. Firestein's writing often advocates for better science writing. In 2012 he released the book Ignorance: How it Drives Science, and in 2015, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful.

Feminist biology is an approach to biology that is concerned with the influence of gender values, the removal of gender bias, and the understanding of the overall role of social values in biological research and practices. Feminist biology was founded by, among others, Ruth Bleier of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It aims to enhance biology by incorporating feminist critique in matters varying from the mechanisms of cell biology and sex selection to the assessment of the meaning of words such as "gender" and "sex". Overall, the field is broadly defined and pertains itself to philosophies behind both biological and feminist practice. These considerations make feminist biology debatable and conflictive with itself, particularly when concerning matters of biological determinism, whereby descriptive sex terms of male and female are intrinsically confining, or extreme postmodernism, whereby the body is viewed more as a social construct. Despite opinions ranging from determinist to postmodernist, however, biologists, feminists, and feminist biologists of varying labels alike have made claims to the utility of applying feminist ideology to biological practice and procedure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of scientific ignorance</span> Study of ignorance in science

The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is the study of ignorance in and of science. The most common way is to see ignorance as something relevant, rather than simply lack of knowledge. There are two distinct areas in which SSI is being studied: some focus on ignorance in scientific research, whereas others focus on public ignorance of science. Sociology of scientific ignorance is a complementary field to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist philosophy of science</span> Means of interpreting scientific evidence through a feminist lens

Feminist philosophy of science is a branch of feminist philosophy that seeks to understand how the acquirement of knowledge through scientific means has been influenced by notions of gender identity and gender roles in society. Feminist philosophers of science question how scientific research and scientific knowledge itself may be influenced and possibly compromised by the social and professional framework within which that research and knowledge is established and exists. The intersection of gender and science allows feminist philosophers to reexamine fundamental questions and truths in the field of science to reveal how gender biases may influence scientific outcomes. The feminist philosophy of science has been described as being located "at the intersections of the philosophy of science and feminist science scholarship" and has attracted considerable attention since the 1980s.

References

  1. ↑ Cama, Timothy (26 February 2015). "Inhofe hurls snowball on Senate floor". The Hill. Archived from the original on 14 October 2022.
  2. ↑ Barrett, Ted (27 February 2015). "Inhofe brings snowball on Senate floor as evidence globe is not warming". CNN. Archived from the original on 7 April 2023.
  3. ↑ "NASA, NOAA Analyses Reveal Record-Shattering Global Warm Temperatures in 2015". NASA. 20 January 2016. Archived from the original on 29 December 2023.
  4. ↑ Woolf, Nicky (26 February 2015). "Republican Senate environment chief uses snowball as prop in climate rant". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 21 October 2023.
  5. 1 2 Kreye, Andrian (2007). "We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)". The Edge World Question Center 2007. Edge Foundation. p. 6. Retrieved 12 August 2007. This is about a society's choice between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford science historian Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance)
  6. 1 2 Kenyon, Georgina (6 January 2016). "The man who studies the spread of ignorance". BBC Future .
  7. 1 2 3 Palmer, Barbara (4 October 2005). "Conference to explore the social construction of ignorance". Stanford News Service. Archived from the original on 24 July 2007. Retrieved 12 August 2007. Proctor uses the term "agnotology" – a word coined from agnosis, meaning "not knowing" – to describe a new approach to looking at knowledge through the study of ignorance.
  8. ↑ Kreye, Andrian (17 May 2010). "Polonium in Zigaretten : Müll in der Kippe (Polonium in cigarettes : Garbage in the butt)". Sueddeutsche Zeitung . Retrieved 15 July 2014. Proctor:...Die Tabakindustrie hat ... verlangt, dass mehr geforscht wird. Das ist reine Ablenkungsforschung. Wir untersuchen in Stanford inzwischen, wie Unwissen hergestellt wird. Es ist eine Kunst – wir nennen sie Agnotologie. (Proctor:...The tobacco industry has ... called for further study. That is pure distraction research. At Stanford, we study how ignorance is manufactured. It is an art we call agnotology.)
  9. 1 2 "Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance" . Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  10. ↑ Knobloch-Westerwick (2009). "Study: Americans choose media messages that agree with their views". Communication Research. 36. Sage: 426–448. doi:10.1177/0093650209333030. S2CID   26354296. Archived from the original on 9 July 2009. Retrieved 6 July 2009.
  11. ↑ Thakkar RR, Garrison MM, Christakis DA (5 November 2006). "A Systematic Review for the Effects of Television Viewing by Infants and Preschoolers". Pediatrics. 118 (5): 2025–2031. doi:10.1542/peds.2006-1307. PMID   17079575. S2CID   26071118.
  12. ↑ Pyle, George (6 April 2020). "George Pyle: It can be hard to know whom to trust. And easy to know whom not to". The Salt Lake Tribune. Archived from the original on 13 April 2020.
  13. ↑ "My hope for devising a new term was to suggest the opposite, namely, the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known-and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things. In 1992, I posed this challenge to the linguist Iain Boal, and it was he who came up with the term agnotology, in the spring of that year.” Robert N. Proctor, "Postscript on the Coining of the Term 'Agnotology'", in "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance", Eds. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, 2008, Stanford University Press, page 27.
  14. ↑ Agnotology: understanding our ignorance, 15 December 2016, retrieved 31 January 2017 interview with Robert Proctor "So I asked a linguist colleague of mine, Iain Boal, if he could coin a term that would designate the production of ignorance and the study of ignorance, and we came up with a number of different possibilities."
  15. ↑ Arenson, Karen W. (22 August 2006). "What Organizations Don't Want to Know Can Hurt". The New York Times. 'there is a lot more protectiveness than there used to be,' said Dr. Proctor, who is shaping a new field, the study of ignorance, which he calls agnotology. 'It is often safer not to know.'
  16. ↑ "Stanford History Department : Robert N. Proctor". Stanford University. Archived from the original on 19 March 2007. Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  17. ↑ Proctor 1995, p.  8.
  18. ↑ Brown, Nancy Marie (September 2001). "The Agateer". Research Penn State. Archived from the original on 11 August 2007. Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  19. ↑ Cohen, Patricia (14 June 2003). "History for Hire in Industry Lawsuits". The New York Times . Retrieved 15 July 2014. Mr. Proctor, who describes his specialty as "agnotology, the study of ignorance", argues that the tobacco industry has tried to give the impression that the hazards of cigarette smoking are still an open question even when the scientific evidence is indisputable. "The tobacco industry is famous for having seen itself as a manufacturer of two different products," he said, "tobacco and doubt".
  20. 1 2 3 "IRWG director hopes to create 'go to' center for gender studies". Stanford News Service. 13 October 2004. Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  21. 1 2 Schiebinger, L. (2004). "Feminist History of Colonial Science". Hypatia. 19 (1): 233–254. doi:10.2979/HYP.2004.19.1.233. I develop a methodological tool that historian of science Robert Proctor has called "agnotology"—the study of culturally-induced ignorances—that serves as a counterweight to more traditional concerns for epistemology, refocusing questions about "how we know" to include questions about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of the cultural and political struggle.
  22. ↑ "Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance". The British Society for the History of Science. Archived from the original on 21 August 2016. Retrieved 15 July 2014. Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture Pennsylvania University Presents a Workshop: ... Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, co-organizers
  23. ↑ Proctor & Schiebinger 2008.
  24. 1 2 Proctor, Robert N. (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. p. 17.
  25. ↑ Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press. ISBN   978-1608193943.
  26. ↑ Herwig, A.; Simoncini, M. (2016). Law and the Management of Disasters: The Challenge of Resilience. Law, Science and Society. Taylor & Francis. p. 86. ISBN   978-1-317-27368-4 . Retrieved 2 May 2021.
  27. 1 2 Betancourt, Michael (2010). Kroker, Arthur; Kroker, Marilouise (eds.). "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism". CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc002. Archived from the original on 5 October 2010. Retrieved 6 September 2010.
  28. ↑ Betancourt, Michael (2015). The critique of digital capitalism : an analysis of the political economy of digital culture and technology. New York: Punctum Books. ISBN   978-0-692-59844-3. OCLC   1097118186.
  29. ↑ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Agnoiology"  . Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 378.
  30. ↑ Porter, Noah, ed. (1913). Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. G & C. Merriam Co.
  31. ↑ "James Frederick Ferrier". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  32. ↑ Stone, Glenn Davis (2014). "Biosecurity in the Age of Genetic Engineering". In Chen, Nancy; Sharp, Lesley A. (eds.). Bioinsecurity and vulnerability (1 ed.). Santa Fe, New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press. pp. 71–86. ISBN   978-1-938645-42-6. OCLC   881518431.
  33. ↑ Rueckert, Ulrich (2020). "Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitronics". In Murmann, B.; Hoefflinger, B. (eds.). NANO-CHIPS 2030. The Frontiers Collection. Springer. pp. 549–562. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18338-7_28. ISBN   978-3-030-18338-7. S2CID   226744728.
  34. 1 2 "THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on COGNITONICS: The Science about the Human Being in the Digital World". Archived from the original on 29 November 2012. Retrieved 4 February 2013.
  35. ↑ Schick, İrvin Cemil (1999). The erotic margin : sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse. London: Verso. ISBN   1-85984-732-3. OCLC   40776818.

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