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...