AGNOTOLOGY

The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance

Stanford University Press

Contents

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Agnotology

A Missing Term to Describe the CulturalProduction of Ignorance (and Its Study)

ROBERT N. PROCTOR

We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignoranceis not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence,and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writingabout what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance.Thomas Pynchon, 1984

Doubt is our product.

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, internal memo, 1969

PHILOSOPHERS LOVE TO TALK ABOUT KNOWLEDGE. A whole fieldis devoted to reflection on the topic, with product tie-ins to professorshipsand weighty conferences. Epistemology is serious business, taughtin academies the world over: there is "moral" and "social" epistemology,epistemology of the sacred, the closet, and the family. There is a ComputationalEpistemology Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, and aCenter for Epistemology at the Free University in Amsterdam. A Googlesearch turns up separate websites for "constructivist," "feminist," and"evolutionary" epistemology, of course, but also "libidinal," "android,""Quaker," "Internet," and (my favorite) "erotometaphysical" epistemology.Harvard offers a course in the field (without the erotometaphysicalpart), which (if we are to believe its website) explores the epistemic statusof weighty claims like "the standard meter is 1 meter long" and "I am nota brain in a vat." We seem to know a lot about knowledge.

What is remarkable, though, is how little we know about ignorance.There is not even a well-known word for its study (though our hope is tochange that), no fancy conferences or polished websites. This is particularlyremarkable, given (a) how much ignorance there is, (b) how many kindsthere are, and (c) how consequential ignorance is in our lives.

The point of this volume is to argue that there is much, in fact, to know.Ignorance has many friends and enemies, and figures big in everything fromtrade association propaganda to military operations to slogans chanted atchildren. Lawyers think a lot about it, since it often surfaces in consumerproduct liability and tort litigation, where the question is often "Whoknew what, and when?" Ignorance has many interesting surrogates andoverlaps in myriad ways with—as it is generated by—secrecy, stupidity,apathy, censorship, disinformation, faith, and forgetfulness, all of whichare science-twitched. Ignorance hides in the shadows of philosophy and isfrowned upon in sociology, but it also pops up in a great deal of popularrhetoric: it's no excuse, it's what can't hurt you, it's bliss. Ignorance has ahistory and a complex political and sexual geography, and does a lot ofother odd and arresting work that bears exploring.

And deploring—though we don't see inquiry in this area as necessarilyhaving the goal of rectification. Ignorance is most commonly seen (ortrivialized) in this way, as something in need of correction, a kind of naturalabsence or void where knowledge has not yet spread. As educators, ofcourse, we are committed to spreading knowledge. But ignorance is morethan a void—and not even always a bad thing. No one needs or wants toknow everything all the time; and surely all of us know things we wouldrather others not know. A founding principle of liberal states is that omnisciencecan be dangerous, and that some things should be kept private.Rights to privacy are essentially a form of sanctioned ignorance: liberalgovernments are (supposed to be) barred from knowing everything; inquisitorsmust have warrants. Juries are also supposed to be kept ignorant,since knowledge can be a form of bias. There is virtuous ignorance, in theform of resistance to (or limits placed on) dangerous knowledge.

The causes of ignorance are multiple and diverse. Not many peopleknow that the biggest building in the world is a semi-secret facility builtto produce explosive uranium-235, using enormous magnets, near a nondescripttown in southern Ohio (Piketon); but that is for reasons that aredifferent from why we don't know much about the origin of life, or anythingat all about time before the Big Bang circa 14 billion years ago. Andthere are many different ways not to know. Ignorance can be the flipside ofmemory, what we don't know because we have forgotten, parts of whichcan be restored by historical inquiries but most of which is forever lost.(And we often cannot say which.) Ignorance can be made or unmade, andscience can be complicit in either process.

THE PURPOSE OF THE PRESENT VOLUME IS PROGRAMMATIC, to begin adiscussion of ignorance as more than the "not yet known" or the steadilyretreating frontier. We need to think about the conscious, unconscious, andstructural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and conformations,whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy,or suppression. The point is to question the naturalness of ignorance, itscauses and its distribution. Why have so few Americans heard about theNakba? Why did epidemiologists miss the high levels of pellagra amongearly-twentieth-century African Americans? How did World War I-eraresearch into the reproductive effects of alcohol become "scientificallyuninteresting"? Why have today's geneticists developed a "collective amnesia"about Francis Galton? Why do "we" (many men and surely fewerwomen) know so little about the clitoris (see Nancy Tuana, this volume), orlaws of nature classified for national security, or indigenous abortifacients(see Londa Schiebinger, this volume), or the countless Xs or Ys or Zs thatwe cannot even name, given how low they fly under the radar?

Now, certain kinds of exploration require that we make distinctions; thatis a reasonable first step into understanding. "Cutting up" and "dividing intoparts" is implicit in the etymology of scientia, which derives from the proto-Indo-Europeanskein, via the Latin seco and scindo (to cut), from which weget scissors and schism, scat and skin. There must be as many kinds of ignoranceas of knowledge—perhaps more, given how scant is our knowledgecompared to the vastness of our ignorance. And though distinctions suchas these are somewhat arbitrary, I shall make three to begin the discussion:ignorance as native state (or resource), ignorance as lost realm (or selectivechoice), and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (oractive construct). There are of course other ways to divide this pie, and severalof the contributors to this volume provide alternative taxonomies.

IGNORANCE AS NATIVE STATE

This may be the most common way that scientists think about our topic:ignorance is like Kansas, a great place to be from. Knowledge grows outof ignorance, as a flower from honest soil, but the direction of movementis pretty much one way. Here, though, ignorance can also be a prompt forknowledge, insofar as we are constantly striving to destroy it—fact by fact.Ignorance has both an ontogeny and a phylogeny: babies start out ignorantand slowly come to know the world; hominids have become sapient over millionsof years from the happy accident of upright posture and not knowingwhat to do with our idle hands. (I personally favor the theory that bipedalismenabled us to "put things in quotes" with our newly freed fingers.)

Ignorance in this sense of a primitive or native state is something to befought or overcome; we hope and plan for it to disappear over time, asknowledge triumphs over foolish superstition. Ignorance is not necessarilyevil—it can be innocent (as knowledge can be sin). But it seems to besomething we are all supposed to want to grow out of, to put behind us,in the process of generating (or acquiring) knowledge. Johannes Kepler inthe sixteenth century had a rather brutal way of putting it: ignorance was"the mother who must die for science to be born."

And foolish ignorance abounds. Jay Leno makes good sport interviewingpeople who don't know whether the Earth has one or two moons, orwhat day of the week Good Friday lands on. More serious is the fact that52 percent of all Americans answer "yes" when asked whether "the earliesthumans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs." Science educators (andall thinking people) worry about the fact that about half of all Americansbelieve the Earth is only 6,000 years old, among them several former andliving presidents. Ronald Reagan once proclaimed in a televised speechthat America was great "because it has never known slavery"; ignoranceseems to know no bounds.

Ignorance in this sense of "native" or "originary" state implies a kind ofdeficit, caused by the naiveté of youth or the faults of improper education—orthe simple fact that here is a place where knowledge has not yet penetrated.Ignorance is compared to innocence or, in the secular variant, knowledge inits infancy, with ontogeny more or less recapitulating phylogeny. Scientistsoften cherish this kind of ignorance, using it as a prompt to inquiry. There isthe familiar grant application version: we know this and that but not yet thisother thing—so fund me please! Fill this gaping hole (which also happens tobe my pocketbook)! Less cynical renditions are familiar from the history ofphilosophy: Socrates taught that the truly wise are those who realize howlittle they know; knowledge of one's ignorance is a precondition for enlightenment.The modern twist has ignorance as something to be escaped butalso as a kind of rejuvenating force, since it is only by asking the right questions—byknowing wherein fruitful (that is, eradicable) ignorance lies—thatwe can ever come to knowledge. Creative intellects are ignorance experts:they know where it can be found, and how to make it go away.

Modernity gives this a greater sense of urgency, insofar as ignorancebecomes a kind of vacuum or hollow space into which knowledge is pulled.Science rushes in to fill the void, or rushes out to greet the world, if we recallthe birthing metaphor of Kepler. Psychoanalytics aside, we could givevarious names to this theory of ignorance. I have called it native ignorance,because the notion is of a kind of infantile absence by virtue of primitivity,a dearth or cavity that is rectified (filled) by growth or birth—thoughother metaphors are used. Light floods the darkness, keys are found tounlock locks, ignorance is washed away, teaching uplifts out of ignorance,which is thereby destroyed or chased, and so forth.

Ignorance here is seen as a resource, or at least a spur or challenge orprompt: ignorance is needed to keep the wheels of science turning. Newignorance must forever be rustled up to feed the insatiable appetite of science.The world's stock of ignorance is not being depleted, however, since(by wondrous fortune and hydra-like) two new questions arise for every oneanswered. Some veils of ignorance are pushed aside but others always popup, saving us from the end of inquiry. This regenerative power of ignorancemakes the scientific enterprise sustainable. The nightmare would be if wewere somehow to run out of ignorance, idling the engines of knowledgeproduction. We need ignorance to fuel our knowledge engines. Scienceis sustainable because ignorance proliferates, a triumph not foreseen byearly champions of modernity. Bacon and Descartes both envisioned a timein the not so distant future—perhaps within their own lifetimes—whenall scientific problems would be solved—but later Moderns knew a goodthing when they saw it, and how to keep it going.

A vast literature exists on how to escape from ignorance, including therecognition that learning often implies a process of "unlearning" (try anyof the 542,000 Google hits for this term). But there is also the appreciationthat the distribution of ignorance is unequal, hence the digital divide,remedialisms of various sorts, and so forth. Technologies can cause theproliferation of ignorance: "the public seems to be awakening to the factthat in the midst of the 'information' explosion, there has been an 'ignorance'explosion as well." Media analyst Sut Jhally in 1991 made headlineswhen he found that people were misinformed about the Gulf War indirect proportion to how much TV they had watched on the topic. Radiowas early on criticized as a vehicle for propaganda (spreading ignorance,as was often said), and Walter Benjamin discussed the quaint idea from the1920s that film could lead to a kind of dictatorship of the imagination, viaan enforced railroading of the eye (versus the freedom purportedly allowedby static graphic arts). The Internet has certainly fostered the spread offictions along with facts—as when South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki"during a late-night Internet surfing session" happened on, and becameconvinced by, a website challenging the view that HIV was the cause ofAIDS. The president's views were later used to justify a slowdown in effortsto combat exposure to the virus.

Our interest here, though, is less in remediation than in what NancyTuana has called the "liberatory moment"—which brings us to a moresubtle form of agnotology.

IGNORANCE AS LOST REALM, ORSELECTIVE CHOICE (OR PASSIVE CONSTRUCT)

This second variant recognizes that ignorance, like knowledge, has a politicalgeography, prompting us to ask: Who knows not? And why not?Where is there ignorance and why? Like knowledge or wealth or poverty,ignorance has a face, a house, and a price: it is encouraged here and discouragedthere from ten thousand accidents (and deliberations) of socialfortune. It is less like a vacuum than a solid or shifting body—which travelsthrough time and occupies space, runs roughshod over people or things,and often leaves a shadow. Who at Hiroshima did not know to leave thecity that day, and turned into a shadow on the asphalt?

Part of the idea is that inquiry is always selective. We look here ratherthan there; we have the predator's fovea (versus the indiscriminate watchfulnessof prey), and the decision to focus on this is therefore invariably achoice to ignore that. Ignorance is a product of inattention, and since wecannot study all things, some by necessity—almost all, in fact—must be leftout. "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object Ainvolves a neglect of object B." And the world is very big—much biggerthan the world of Descartes and Bacon, with their hopes for an imminentfinish to the project of science. A key question, then, is: how should weregard the "missing matter," knowledge not yet known? Is science morelike the progressive illumination of a well-defined box, or does darknessgrow as fast as the light?

Both images are common. Selectivity is often conceived as transient,evanescent, a kind of "noise" in the system or scatter about the line,with bias slowly being rectified. Science is like mowing your lawn: youcan choose any place to start, but things end up looking pretty much thesame. I was recently faced with a succinct (albeit unpleasant) version ofthis in a peer review of a grant proposal of mine to the National ScienceFoundation. This rather disgruntled hooded "peer" was unhappy with myrequest for funds to study the history of paleoanthropology, given my failureto recognize, as he or she put it, that science was biased "only in thepast, but not in the present." In this undialogic context I did not have theopportunity to respond to this wonderfully self-refuting chestnut, whichsoured as soon as it was uttered; I couldn't point out that errors often dolanguish, projects go unfunded, opportunities are lost, the dead do notspring back to life, and justice does not always prevail—even in science.This is a different sense of selectivity: that knowledge switched onto onetrack cannot always return to areas passed over; we don't always havethe opportunity to correct old errors. Research lost is not just researchdelayed; it can also be forever marked or never recovered.

Londa Schiebinger describes a clear instance of agnotology of this sortin her essay for this volume. The background here is that for three or fourcenturies following the first transits of the Atlantic and circumnavigationsof Africa, European monarchs and trading companies sent out ships insearch of fame or fortune, conquering and colonizing but also capturingknowledge and wealth from far-flung territories. Not all knowledge gainedin the peripheries flowed back to the center, however. The passage wasunequal in that only certain kinds of goods were imported, while otherswere ignored. Abortifacients in particular were excluded: African and Europeanwomen knew many different ways to prevent childbirth, but thesewere judged irrelevant to the kind of knowledge/extraction projects favoredby the colonizing Europeans. The potato was fine, as was quinine fromthe bark of the Cinchona tree (for malaria), but not the means by which(white) women might have prevented conception or caused abortion. Europeangovernments were trying to grow their populations and conquernew territories, for which they needed quinine but not the peacock flower(the abortifacient described by Sibylla Maria Merian in 1710). Methods ofcontraception or abortion were low on the list of priorities, and the plantsused for such purposes by the indigenes were simply ignored.

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(Continues...)Excerpted from AGNOTOLOGY by Robert N. Proctor. Copyright © 2008 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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