Agnotology: The Art of Ignorance
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mKcDS6OtXH8
Quote: "Agnotology is the study of ignorance making, the lost and forgotten. One focus is on knowledge that could have been but wasn't, or should be but isn't, but we shall also see that not all ignorance is bad (Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L., 2008, p.vii). Quote: "Big Tobacco wants us to believe that there are really only two kinds of knowledge in question : popular and scientific. Ignored is the role of the industry itself in creating ignorance: via advertising, duplicitous press releases, funding of decoy research, establishment of scientific front organizations, manipulation of legislative agendas, organization of 'friendly research' for publication in popular magazines, and myriad additional projects from the dark arts of agnotology" (Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L., 2008, p.17). Quote: "In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter 'anti-cigarette forces'. In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.' This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer. Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology" (Kenyon, G., 2016). Concept: "justified true belief" (JTB) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge#Justified_true_belief Further: http://trigg.gr/tag/PloyManufacturingDoubt Quote: "It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be de-famed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end is—being destroyed" (Arendt, H., 1967, p.82). https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/files/2018/08/Arendt_-Truth-and-Politics-LQ.pdf Bibliography: Kenyon, G. (2016, 6th January 2016). 'The man who studies the spread of ignorance'. BBC Future. http://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (Eds.). (2008). 'Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance'. Stanford University Press. http://wp.unil.ch/serendip/files/2018/10/Agnotology-Ch-1-Proctor-2008.pdf Arendt, H. (1967). 'Truth and Politics'. The New Yorker. Schneider, A. (2024). 'Justified True Crisis'. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388921991_Justified_True_Crisis
