The history of ignorance is moving hand-to-hand with the history of knowledge as emphasized in Verburgt’s recent paper, The History of Knowledge and The Future History of Ignorance: “(…) the history of knowledge does not just expand the boundaries of the history of science but investigates the boundaries between different forms of science, different forms of knowledge, and different forms of not knowing, in all possible combinations.” (Verburgt, 2020, p. 18).
As Hayek once iterated, knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts, and going further, they are weirdly interchangeable and even convertible. Living in the era in which knowledge is the most valuable endowment, the matters on who will hold, direct, and distribute knowledge largely occupy the minds of administrative officers, scholars, corporate owners, and citizens. Does lack of knowledge imply a kind of ignorance? To some extent, yes, but the contemporary definition of ignorance prompts a bigger picture. Although the modern connotation of ignorance went unnoticed until a very sharp uprising against tobacco industry in 2008, three different versions of ignorance worth to discuss before expounding on recent and future directions of ignorance.
As a very brief introduction, the first definition of ignorance focuses on individual’s awareness of their own knowledge storage. It is almost applicable to everyone who is new to a subject or a field. The second approach points out cognitive limitations that can only drive us to a certain point where we cannot go further. Lack of education would be one cause of this ignorance, although those individuals do not effortlessly accept that. The third definition emphasizes on intentionally tarnished knowledge orienting masses many and conflicting pathways. Manuela Fernández Pinto identifies this ignorance as being artificial or manufactured and therefore it is not related to the individual’s cognitive or educational state. It is an integral part of social structure while its relations to politics are not always at the surface (Pinto 2015, p. 295). The acceleration of this new type of ignorance stems from the abrupt separation of scientific community from the public during the Cold War period. While scientific rationality encapsulated itself in ivory towers, the public had grown the suspicion of democracy after the Bomb and it was really confused with the statistical interpretation of knowledge as an implication of the Double Truth Doctrine. As a result, the public equipped with trust issues towards experts (referring to interactionist account of trust) with mounting skepticism. This type of skepticism and doubt have turned into a strategy at the hands of corporations.
Agnotology is the study of calculated and manufactured ignorance and scientific misrepresentations. One distinguished scholar who confronted the perpetrators of the manufactured ignorance with the public was Robert N. Proctor. He was initially working on lung cancer and its potential causes. From 1920s to 1950s, the causes of lung cancer were attributed to asphalt dust from roads, industrial air pollution or the global influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 along with smoking (Proctor, 2012, p. 87). Proctor provided four lines of evidence showing that tobacco is the main factor of lung cancer. He revealed that the systematic ignorance was prompted by tobacco firms arranging polls and promoting propaganda films. As reported by Proctor, “Anne Duffin at the Tobacco Institute was happy to report that the film had reduced by 17.8% the number of people agreeing that ‘Cigarette smoking cause [s] lung cancer’ (from 74.9% to 57.1%) (Proctor, 2012, p.89). Those companies even hired a PR firm whose slogan being ‘doubt is our product’. The firms targeted scientific uncertainty as it is understood by non-experts that a kind of weakness of any scientific study. Various forms of uncertainty are buried in nature in the form of probability while it is very complicated to explain this to someone outside of natural sciences. The tobacco industry utilized friendly scientists who can go astray from truth and scientific method since they know data mining and statistics are open to manipulation. The industry that heavily fortified with scientists attacked any unfriendly research on causes of lung cancer. Besides, many hundreds of experts testified for the industry on the court (Proctor, 2012, p.91). Ignorance stipulated across the public has nothing to do with personal capabilities or wisdom, but it flashes light on systematic and structural compositions around corporations’ will. As in the discussed example, the industry is not targeting a specified type of citizen but rather, it is generating conditions for reengineering natural state of civilization by promoting denialism in the short term and by fostering entrepreneurial attempts for geoengineering and pharma in the long term. Ignorance in the post truth era is creating echo chambers of tales that whisper experts are not that reliable while industries can put experts on the stage to show the public that experts are already on board with them. The public is hearing conflicting scientific theories (mask vs. no mask, climate change vs. no change) all the time and naming or assigning some as conspiracy theories. Truth is eroded as such the cognitive participation in democracy transferred from experts to citizens tasking them to decide on the validity of scientific inquiry while feeding them with falsified information or simply, ignorance. However, consciously produced ignorance cannot be brainwashed (referring to Kitcher’s weakness in well-ordered science definition discussed in Mirowski’s lectures).
The reflection of current picture in agnotology is not very optimistic, yet we can finally cheer out for the ending of our ignorance of ignorance in the sense of the third definition (Verburgt, 2020, p.18). Knowledge is now so valuable that there is no way to distribute it before pipelining through corporations. The public is involved to heated scientific debates with their twisted truth alas the wind is blowing as corporations want.
References
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures.. Agnotology, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Kitcher on democracy, University of Notre Dame.
Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Neoliberalism 2 – Ignorance, University of Notre Dame.
Pinto, M. F. (2015). Tensions in agnotology: Normativity in the studies of commercially driven ignorance. Social Studies of Science, 45(2), 294–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714565491
Proctor, R. N. (2012). The history of the discovery of the cigarette—lung cancer link: Evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll. Tobacco Control, 21(2), 87–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41515996
Verburgt, L. M. (2020). The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance. KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 4(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/708341