chapter 1

Agnotology
A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural
Production of Ignorance (and Its Study)
robert n. proctor

We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance
is not just a blank space on a persons mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing
about 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

p h i l o s o p h e r s l o v e t o t a l k a b o u t k n o w l e d g e . A whole field

is devoted to reflection on the topic, with product tie-ins to professorships and weighty conferences. Epistemology is serious business, taught
in academies the world over: there is moral and social epistemology,
epistemology of the sacred, the closet, and the family. There is a Computational Epistemology Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, and a
Center for Epistemology at the Free University in Amsterdam. A Google
search 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 erotometaphysical
part), which (if we are to believe its website) explores the epistemic status
of weighty claims like the standard meter is 1 meter long and I am not
a brain in a vat.1 We seem to know a lot about knowledge.2
What is remarkable, though, is how little we know about ignorance.3
There is not even a well-known word for its study (though our hope is to
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change thatsee Box 1), no fancy conferences or polished websites. This is

particularly remarkable, given (a) how much ignorance there is, (b) how many
kinds there 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 from
trade association propaganda to military operations to slogans chanted at
children. Lawyers think a lot about it, since it often surfaces in consumer
product liability and tort litigation, where the question is often Who
knew what, and when? Ignorance has many interesting surrogates and
overlaps in myriad ways withas it is generated bysecrecy, stupidity,
apathy, censorship, disinformation, faith, and forgetfulness, all of which
are science-twitched. Ignorance hides in the shadows of philosophy and is
frowned upon in sociology, but it also pops up in a great deal of popular
rhetoric: its no excuse, its what cant hurt you, its bliss. Ignorance has a
history and a complex political and sexual geography, and does a lot of
other odd and arresting work that bears exploring.
And deploringthough we dont see inquiry in this area as necessarily having the goal of rectification. Ignorance is most commonly seen (or
trivialized) in this way, as something in need of correction, a kind of natural absence or void where knowledge has not yet spread. As educators, of
course, we are committed to spreading knowledge. But ignorance is more
than a voidand not even always a bad thing. No one needs or wants to
know everything all the time; and surely all of us know things we would
rather others not know. A founding principle of liberal states is that omniscience can be dangerous, and that some things should be kept private.
Rights to privacy are essentially a form of sanctioned ignorance: liberal
governments are (supposed to be) barred from knowing everything; inquisitors must have warrants. Juries are also supposed to be kept ignorant,
since knowledge can be a form of bias. There is virtuous ignorance, in the
form of resistance to (or limits placed on) dangerous knowledge.4
The causes of ignorance are multiple and diverse. Not many people
know that the biggest building in the world is a semi-secret facility built
to produce explosive uranium-235, using enormous magnets, near a nondescript town in southern Ohio (Piketon); but that is for reasons that are
different from why we dont know much about the origin of life, or any2

agnotology: a missing t er m

thing at all about time before the Big Bang circa 14 billion years ago. And
there are many different ways not to know. Ignorance can be the flipside of
memory, what we dont know because we have forgotten, parts of which
can be restored by historical inquiries but some of which is forever lost.
(And we often cannot say which.) Ignorance can be made or unmade, and
science can be complicit in either process.
t h e p u r p o s e o f t h e p r e s e n t v o l u m e is programmatic, to begin a

discussion of ignorance as more than the not yet known or the steadily
retreating frontier. We need to think about the conscious, unconscious, and
structural 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,
its causes and its distribution. Why have so few Americans heard about the
Nakba? Why did epidemiologists miss the high levels of pellagra among
early twentieth-century African Americans?5 How did WWI-era research
into the reproductive effects of alcohol become scientifically uninteresting?6 Why have todays geneticists developed a collective amnesia about
Francis Galton?7 Why do we (many men and surely fewer women) know
so little about the clitoris (see Nancy Tuana, this volume), or laws of nature classified for national security, or indigenous abortifacients (see Londa
Schiebinger, this volume), or the countless Xs or Ys or Zs that we cannot
even name, given how low they fly under the radar?
Now, certain kinds of exploration require that we make distinctions; that
is a reasonable first step into understanding. Cutting up and dividing into
parts is implicit in the etymology of scientia, which derives from the protoIndoeuropean skein, via the Latin seco and scindo (to cut), from which we
get scissors and schism, scat and skin. There must be as many kinds of ignorance as of knowledgeperhaps more, given how scant is our knowledge
compared to the vastness of our ignorance. And though distinctions such
as these are somewhat arbitrary, I shall make three to begin the discussion:
ignorance as native state (or resource), ignorance as lost realm (or selective
choice), and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (or active construct). There are of course other ways to divide this pie, and several
of the contributors to this volume provide alternative taxonomies.
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ignorance as native state

This may be the most common way scientists think about ignorance: ignorance is like Kansas, a great place to be from. Knowledge grows out of
ignorance, as a flower from honest soil, but the direction of movement is
pretty much one way. Here, though, ignorance can also be a prompt for
knowledge, insofar as we are constantly striving to destroy itfact by fact.
Ignorance has both an ontogeny and a phylogeny: babies start out ignorant
and slowly come to know the world, hominids have become sapient over millions of years from the happy accident of upright posture and not knowing
what to do with our idle hands. (I personally favor the theory that bipedalism enabled us to put things in quotes with our newly freed fingers.)
Ignorance in this sense of a primitive or native state is something to be
fought or overcome; we hope and plan for it to disappear over time, as
knowledge triumphs over foolish superstition. Ignorance is not necessarily evilit can be innocent (as knowledge can be sin). But it seems to be
something we are all supposed to want to grow out of, to put behind us,
in the process of generating (or acquiring) knowledge. Johannes Kepler in
the sixteenth century had a rather brutal way of putting it: ignorance was
the mother who must die for science to be born.8
And foolish ignorance abounds. Jay Leno makes good sport interviewing people who dont know whether the Earth has one or two moons, or
what day of the week Good Friday lands on. More serious is the fact that
52 percent of all Americans answer yes when asked whether the earliest
humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.9 Science educators (and
all thinking people) worry about the fact that about half of all Americans
believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, among them several former and
living presidents. Ronald Reagan once proclaimed in a televised speech
that America was great because it has never known slavery; ignorance
seems to know no bounds.
Ignorance in this sense of native or originary state implies a kind
of deficit, caused by the naivet of youth or the faults of improper educationor the simple fact that here is a place where knowledge has not yet
penetrated. Ignorance is compared to innocence or, in the secular variant,
knowledge in its infancy, with ontogeny more or less recapitulating phylogeny.10 Scientists often cherish this kind of ignorance, using it as a prompt
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to inquiry. There is the familiar grant application version: we know this

and that but not yet this other thingso fund me please! Fill this gaping
hole (which also happens to be my pocketbook)! Less cynical renditions
are familiar from the history of philosophy: Socrates taught that the truly
wise are those who realize how little they know; knowledge of ones ignorance is a precondition for enlightenment. The modern twist has ignorance
as something to be escaped but also as a kind of rejuvenating force, since
it is only by asking the right questionsby knowing wherein fruitful (that
is, eradicable) ignorance liesthat we can ever come to knowledge.11 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 ignorance
becomes a kind of vacuum or hollow space into which knowledge is pulled.
Science rushes in to fill the vacuum, or rushes out to greet the world, if we
recall the birthing metaphor of Kepler. Psychoanalytics aside, we could give
various 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 birththough
other metaphors are used. Light floods the darkness, keys are found to
unlock locks, ignorance is washed away, teaching uplifts out of ignorance,
which is thereby destroyed or chased, and so forth.12
Ignorance here is seen as a resource, or at least a spur or challenge or
prompt: ignorance is needed to keep the wheels of science turning. New
ignorance must forever be rustled up to feed the insatiable appetite of
science. The worlds stock of ignorance is not being depleted, however,
since (by wondrous fortune and hydra-like) two new questions arise
for every one answered. Some veils of ignorance are pushed aside but
others always pop-up, saving us from the end of inquiry. This regenerative power of ignorance makes the scientific enterprise sustainable.
The nightmare would be if we were somehow to run out of ignorance,
idling the engines of knowledge production. We need ignorance to fuel
our knowledge engines. Science is sustainable because ignorance proliferates, a triumph not foreseen by early champions of modernity. Bacon
and Descartes both envisioned a time in the not so distant futureperhaps within their own lifetimeswhen all scientific problems would be
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robert n. proc tor

solvedbut later Moderns knew a good thing when they saw it, and
how to keep it going.
A vast literature exists on how to escape from ignorance, including the
recognition that learning often implies a process of unlearning (try any
of the 542,000 Google hits for this term). But there is also the appreciation that the distribution of ignorance is unequal, hence the digital divide,
remedialisms of various sorts, and so forth. Technologies can cause the
proliferation of ignorance: the public seems to be awakening to the fact
that in the midst of the information explosion, there has been an ignorance explosion as well.13 Media analyst Sut Jhally in 1991 made headlines when he found that people were misinformed about the Gulf War in
direct proportion to how much TV they had watched on the topic.14 Radio
was early on criticized as a vehicle for propaganda (spreading ignorance,
as was often said), and Walter Benjamin discusses the quaint idea from the
1920s that film could lead to a kind of dictatorship of the imagination, via
an enforced railroading of the eye (versus the freedom purportedly allowed
by static graphic arts).15 The Internet has certainly fostered the spread of
fictions along with factsas when South Africas president Thabo Mbeki
during a late-night Internet surfing session happened on, and became
convinced by, a website challenging the view that HIV was the cause of
AIDS.16 The presidents views were later used to justify a slowdown in efforts to combat exposure to the virus.
Our interest here, though, is less in remediation than in what Nancy
Tuana has called the liberatory momentwhich brings us to a more
subtle form of agnotology.
ignorance as lost realm, or
s e l e c t i v e c h o i c e ( o r pas s i v e c o n s t ru c t )
This second variant recognizes that ignorance, like knowledge, has a political geography, 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 discouraged there from ten thousand accidents (and deliberations) of social
fortune. It is less like a vacuum than a solid or shifting bodywhich travels
through time and occupies space, runs roughshod over people or things,
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and often leaves a shadow. Who at Hiroshima did not know to leave the
city that day, and turned into a shadow on the asphalt?
Part of the idea is that inquiry is always selective. We look here rather
than there; we have the predators fovea (versus the indiscriminate watchfulness of prey), and the decision to focus on this is therefore invariably a
choice to ignore that. Ignorance is a product of inattention, and since we
cannot study all things, some by necessityalmost all, in factmust be left
out. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeinga focus upon object A
involves a neglect of object B.17 And the world is very bigmuch bigger
than the world of Descartes and Bacon, with their hopes for an imminent
finish to the project of science. A key question, then, is: how should we
regard the missing matter, knowledge not yet known? Is science more
like the progressive illumination of a well-defined box, or does darkness
grow 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: you
can choose any place to start, but things end up looking pretty much the
same. I was recently faced with a succinct (albeit unpleasant) version of
this in a peer review of a grant proposal of mine to the National Science
Foundation. This rather disgruntled hooded peer was unhappy with my
request for funds to study the history of paleoanthropology, given my failure to recognize, as he or she put it, that science was biased only in the
past, but not in the present. In this undialogic context I did not have the
opportunity to respond to this wonderfully self-refuting chestnut, which
soured as soon as it was uttered; I couldnt point out that errors often do
languish, projects go unfunded, opportunities are lost, the dead do not
spring back to life, and justice does not always prevaileven in science.
This is a different sense of selectivity: that knowledge switched onto one
track cannot always return to areas passed over; we dont always have
the opportunity to correct old errors.18 Research lost is not just research
delayed; it can also be forever marked or never recovered.
Londa Schiebinger describes a clear instance of agnotology of this sort
in her essay for this volume. The background here is that for three or four
centuries following the first transits of the Atlantic and circumnavigations
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robert n. proc tor

of Africa, European monarchs and trading companies sent out ships in

search of fame or fortune, conquering and colonizing but also capturing
knowledge and wealth from far-flung territories. Not all knowledge gained
in the peripheries flowed back to the center, however. The passage was
unequal in that only certain kinds of goods were imported, while others
were ignored. Abortifacients in particular were excluded: African and European women knew many different ways to prevent childbirth, but these
were judged irrelevant to the kind of knowledge/extraction projects favored
by the colonizing Europeans. The potato was fine, as was quinine from
the bark of the Cinchona tree (for malaria), but not the means by which
(white) women might have prevented conception or caused abortion. European governments were trying to grow their populations and conquer
new territories, for which they needed quinine but not the peacock flower
(the abortifacient described by Sibylla Maria Merian in 1710). Methods of
contraception or abortion were low on the list of priorities, and the plants
used for such purposes by the indigenes were simply ignored.
It may well be that no decision was ever made to ignore or destroy
such knowledge. It is not hard to imagine an overdetermined mix of deliberate and inadvertent neglect, though the boundary is not always clear
between these two. The mechanisms involved in producing or maintaining
ignorance can change over time, and once things are made unknownby
suppression or by apathythey can often remain unknown without further effort. Once lost or destroyed, a document or a species or a culture
does not spring back to life. Diego de Landa must have known this when
he burned the Mayan royal libraries at Mani on the Yucatan in 1562, defending this act of cultural vandalism with the argument that such codices
contained only superstitions and lies of the devil. This bridges into our
next form of agnogenesis: the deliberate production of ignorance in the
form of strategies to deceive.
i g n o r a n c e a s s t r a t e g i c p l oy,
or active construct
The focus here is on ignoranceor doubt or uncertaintyas something
that is made, maintained, and manipulated by means of certain arts and
sciences. The idea is one that easily lends itself to paranoia: namely, that
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certain people dont want you to know certain things, or will actively work
to organize doubt or uncertainty or misinformation to help maintain (your)
ignorance. They know, and may or may not want you to know they know,
but you are not to be privy to the secret. This is an idea insufficiently explored
by philosophers, that ignorance should not be viewed as a simple omission
or gap, but rather as an active production. Ignorance can be actively engineered part of a deliberate plan. Ill begin with trade secrets, moving from
there in the next three sections to tobacco agnotology, military secrecy, and
the example of ignorance making (or acceptance) as moral resistance.
There have always been lots of reasons to keep things secretfor love,
for war, for business, for every conceivable human desire or enterprise.19
Thought itself, of course, is secret until expressed in perishable verbal form,
or in the more durable medium of print or some other enduring mode of
capture. Secrets are as old as human thought and perhaps older still, judging
from the fantastic variety of animal techniques of deception, ranging from
insect camouflage to predators stashing their prey to the myriad disguises
of herbivores. Recall how the white underbellies of deer and most other
ungulates help turn these animals into non-objects by canceling shadows.
Science and trade are often said to be (or forced) open, but secrecy
plays an important role in both realmsthink of peer review, or the jealous guarding of discoveries until publication. Science and industry are
increasingly interwoven, with R&D pursued under cloaks of privacy to
maintain some business advantage. Science even in the best of circumstances is open only under highly ritualized constraints. The point of
confidential peer review, for example, is to guarantee objectivityhere a
kind of balanced fairnessto allow ones peers to criticize without fear
of recrimination. Blinded review comes at a cost, however, since it means
that an authorthe recipient of criticism in this instancecannot consider the source. Reviewers can also act without taking responsibility for
their opinions, except insofar as an editor or grant officer takes this into
account.20 A similar weakness plagues Wikipedia-style publishing, though
preservation of page histories makes it at least theoretically possible to
minimize vandalism (the bigger problem here is the perpetual balance of
terror produced on controversial topics such as intelligent design).
Scientific secrecy long predates peer review. Alchemy and astrology
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robert n. proc tor

were often advertised as occult sciences, in the sense of harnessing dark

powers but also of being practiced in the dark, hidden from view.21 The
two senses were intertwined, since the principles sought were supposed to
lie behind or beyond ordinary kinds of knowledge that flourished in the
light. Much of early modern science was also guild-like, insofar as secrets
of the trade were taken for granted. Trade secrets were guarded to control access to a particular kind of technique, resource, ritual, or market.
Much of the rhetoric of the so-called Scientific Revolution was directed
toward eliminating secrecy, to open up practices to inspectionwhence
the omnipresent rhetorics of light, clarification, and eventually enlightenment. Alchemy done in the light became chemistry.
Trade secrets are still a vital part of manufacturing,22 however, and it
is probably not far from the mark to say that older forms of secrecy have
simply been replaced by newer ones. A great deal of modern chemistry
is tied up with industrial production, making it hard to speak of an open
exchange of ideas. Three or four people are supposed to know the formula for Coke, locked in a vault in Atlanta; the same is true for the spices
used in Kentucky Fried Chicken (in Louisville), and many other celebrated
consumables.23 Publication is one way of claiming intellectual property,
but ideas are also often shared openly only within some restricted social space. Military technologies are an obvious example, but there is a
great deal of private speech inside law firms, hospitals, governments, and
every other kind of institution, for whom knowledge is not just power but
dangerwhich is why institutional amnesia may be as valued as institutional memory. Within academia, scholars will often keep certain ideas
secret or limit their circulation to avoid improper use; and it is only after
publication that circulation becomes difficult to control. Information flows
are also limited for legal or PR purposes, or for reasons of national security. The apparent free flow of ideas celebrated in academia is actually
circumscribed by the things that make it onto the public table; I taught at
Pennsylvania State University for almost a dozen years before I stumbled
onto a department called Undersea Warfare, which is also about how
long it took for me to learn that Penn State was the official university of
the United States Marine Corps. I dont know how many of my former
colleagues were aware of either of these closely held facts.
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But there are other ways ignorance is crafted, and one of the most dramatic examples stems from the black arts of tobacco manufacturers.
Tobacco Industry Agnotology
One of my favorite examples of agnogenesis is the tobacco industrys efforts
to manufacture doubt about the hazards of smoking. It was primarily in
this context (along with military secrecy) that I first began exploring this
idea of manufactured ignorance,24 the question again being why dont
we know what we dont know? The none-too-complex answer in many
instances was because steps have been taken to keep you in the dark!
We rule you, if we can fool you. No one has done this more effectively
than the tobacco mongers, the masters of fomenting ignorance to combat knowledge. Health fears are assuaged by reassurances in the form of
reasonable doubta state of mind with both PR and legal value. The
logic is simple, but it also has some devious twists and turns. Ill deal here
only with the U.S. case, though the duplicity project is now being franchised globally to buttress the continued sale of 5.7 trillion cigarettes per
annum, enough to circle the Earth some 13,000 times.
Marketing has always involved a certain persuasion bordering on deception, insofar as laundry soap is pretty much the same throughout the
world. The tobacco industry early on recognized health concerns as market impediments, which is why L&M Filters were offered as just what
the doctor ordered, Camels were said to be smoked by more doctors,
and so forth. The industry was barred from making such claims in the
1950s and moved to more subtle inducements, associating smoking with
youth, vigor, and beauty, and later freedom, risk, and rebelliousness. For
a time in the 1980s, when health infringements centered around secondhand smoke, we were told that smoking was a form of free speech. The
industry likes to have it both ways: smoking is patriotic yet rebellious,
risky and yet safe, calming and yet exciting, and so forth.
Marketing tools of a novel sort were introduced in the early 1950s,
following the explosion of evidence that cigarettes were killing tens of
thousands every year. Responding to this evidence, the industry launched a
multimillion dollar campaign to reassure consumers that the hazard had not
yet been proven. Through press releases, advertisements, and well-funded
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robert n. proc tor

industry research fronts, epidemiology was denounced as mere statistics,

animal experiments were said not to reflect the human condition, and lung
pathologies revealed at autopsy were derided as anecdotes without sound
science as backing. Cigarette manufacturers often invoked the laboratory
as the site where the controversy would be resolved, knowing that it
was difficult to mimic human smoking effects using animal models. Small
animals just dont contract cancer from breathing smoke; it takes twenty or
thirty or more years for human smokers to develop cancer, and rats dont
live that long. And even when cancers were successfully produced in mice
(by painting tobacco tars on their shaven backs), the industry admitted
only the presence of mouse carcinogens in smoke. Cigarette apologists
worked in a conveniently tight logical circle: no evidence was good enough,
no experiment close enough to the human condition. True proof was hard
to have short of experimenting on humansbut do you really want us to
experiment on humans? What are you, some kind of Nazi?
We dont yet know what evil genius came up with the scheme to associate the continued manufacture of cigarettes with prudence, using the
call for more research to slow the threat of regulation, but it must rank
as one of the greatest triumphs of American corporate connivance.25 The
idea was that people would continue to smoke so long as they could be
reassured that no one really knows the true cause of cancer. The strategy was to question all assertions to the contrary, all efforts to close the
controversy, as if closure itself was a mark of dogma, the enemy of inquiry.
The point was to keep the question of health harms open, for decades if
possible. Cancer after all was a complex disease with multiple causes, all of
which would have to be explored without rushing to any kind of judgment.
We owed as much to those poor souls suffering from this terrible scourge,
we had to keep an open mind, leaving the question of causation open. Do
you want to close down research? Cant you keep an open mind?
Establishing and maintaining the tobacco controversy was a key
element in the industrys PR strategy from the beginnings of the modern
conspiracy in the 1950s. Controversy was like hope, something you (they)
wanted to keep alive. Interminable controversy had an immediate value
in keeping smokers smoking and legislators pliable. It eventually also had
a legal value, insofar as the industry could claim it had never denied the
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hazards, but had only called for further evidence. The idea of no proof
becomes one of the two main pillars of the industrys defense against lawsuits, the other being common knowledge: everyone has always known
about the dangers, so smokers have only themselves to blame for whatever illnesses they may contract. Universal awareness was matched with
open controversy: Everyone knew that cigarettes are harmful, but no one
had ever proven it.26
The strategy is a clever one, though it does require that we adopt a
rather broad rift between popular and scientific knowledge. In court, the
industrys experts do some fancy dancing to make this work, pointing
to historical examples of folk wisdom predating scientific knowledge,
with more cautious confirmations coming only later. Folk healers use an
herb to effect a cure, but it takes some time for doctors to accept this and
grasp how it works. So while popular belief may recognize that tobacco
is hazardous, the science has been much harder to nail down. In court,
the industrys experts like to emphasize the continuance of legitimate
scientific doubt long past even the Surgeon Generals report of 1964.
Kenneth Ludmerer, a St. Louis medical historian and frequent witness
for the industry, recently claimed under cross-examination that there was
room for responsible disagreement with the hazards consensus even
after the Surgeon Generals Report. Indeed, he says, Theres always room
for disagreement.27
A crucial issue in many lawsuits is whether the industry acted responsibly in denying any proof of a hazard. Common knowledge and open
controversy come to the rescue, the hoped-for point being that since everyone has always known that cigarettes are dangerous, the manufacturers
cant be faulted for failing to warn. The establishment of controversy in
the scientific community is also crucial, though, because it gives cigarette
makers yet another excuse for negligence in failing to warn. Why did the
industry not warn smokers of a hazard? Because the issue had not been
settled! No proof was forthcomingso the industry maintained, duplicitously28so we cannot say it acted irresponsibly.29
The tobacco industry was rarely innocent in any of these respects,
since its goal at many points was to generate ignoranceor sometimes
false knowledgeconcerning tobaccos impact on health. The industry
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robert n. proc tor

was trebly active in this sphere, feigning its own ignorance of hazards,
while simultaneously affirming the absence of definite proof in the scientific community, while also doing all it could to manufacture ignorance
on the part of the smoking public. This last-mentioned goal was achieved
by many different means, including release of duplicitous press releases,
publication of nobody knows the answers white papers, and funding
decoy or red-herring research to distract from genuine hazards (which
also functioned as alibi research in subsequent litigation). Common
knowledge was really only a legal arguing pointthe reality desired by
the industry was common ignorance (to keep people smoking). Smokescreen is an appropriate epithet, but we could also talk about disestablishing facts, via several key strategies.
One was simply to conceal whatever hazards the industry knew about,
but another was to fund research that would seem to be addressing tobacco
and health, while really doing nothing of the sort. The chief instrument for
this was the Tobacco Industry Research Council (TIRC), established in 1954
with great fanfare in full-page ads published in 448 of the nations leading
newspapers. The TIRC (later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research)
eventually funded hundred of millions of dollars of research, very little of
which had anything to do with smoking. Little of it ever addressed the question supposedly in doubt: whether and to what extent cigarettes are bad
for your health. The political value of research of this kind (mostly basic
biochemistry) was the fact of its being fundedwhich allowed the industry
to say it was studying the problem. Industry researchers knew from the
beginning what they were supposed to find (and not find): per instructions
from the Tobacco Institute, the TIRC was supposed to manifest confidence
that we do not now know what causes lung cancer or any other kind of
cancer.30 Press releases and publications from the industry beat this drum
pretty hard. In lawyerly fashion, health implications were thought of as
charges to be refuted rather than as topics to be honestly investigated.
Yet another strategy was to publicize alternatives to the cigarette theory. A key instrument in this was the already-mentioned Tobacco Institute, which metastasized from the TIRC in 1958 to serve as the lobbying
and propaganda arm of the industry. For decades, the Tobacco Institute
trumpeted the no proof position of the industry, usually in response to
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new confirmations of one or another tobacco hazard. The institute also

published a monthly newsletter, the Tobacco and Health Report, drawing attention to whatever could be used to distract from tobacco hazards.
The magazine was sent to hundreds of thousands of physicians, plus thousands of other opinion makers from industry, government, and journalism, the purpose being to highlight every possible cause of cancer except
for tobacco. Typical for 1963 and 1964 were articles with titles such as
Rare Fungus Infection Mimics Lung Cancer, Viral Infections Blamed
in Bronchitis Outbreaks, English Surgeon Links Urbanization to Lung
Cancer, Nicotine Effect is Like Exercise, Lung Cancer Rare in Bald
Men, 28 Reasons for Doubting Cigarette-Cancer Link, and No One
Yet Knows the Answers. The magazine blamed bird keeping (feather
mites), genetics, viruses, air pollution, and every other possible cause of
the lung cancer epidemicexcept tobacco.
Throughout this period, the goal of the industry was to comfort by
virtue of allying itself with science. One remarkable organ for this purpose
was Science Fortnightly, an ambitious popular science magazine published
by the Lorillard Tobacco Co. from about 1963 to 1965, mailed free of
charge every two weeks to 1.4 million people. This was one of the best
popular science publications of the decade, treating new archaeological
finds, theories of the origins of the Earth, sociological questions about the
role of blacks and women in science, and dozens of other hot topics. The
point was to introduce a breath of fresh air to science reporting, including
also in every issue a couple of large and serious ads for Kents micronite
filter, made of a pure, dust-free, completely harmless material that is so
safe that it is actually used to help filter the air in operating rooms of leading hospitals. That semi-secret harmless material for a time at least in
the 1950s was crocidolite asbestos.
Cigarette makers were successful for a time in keeping many people in
the dark about the magnitude of certain hazards. A Harris Poll of adults
in 1966 found that not even half of those questioned regarded smoking
as a major cause of lung cancer.31 Surveys conducted that same year for
the U.S. Public Health Service found that only 46 percent of those polled
answered yes when asked: Is there any way at all to prevent a person
from getting lung cancer? A fifth of those answered yes in response to
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robert n. proc tor

the same question about emphysema and chronic bronchitis.32 Thirteenand fourteen-year-olds were not polled, but it would be surprising if
their awareness was any higher. Even today, how many people know that
smoking is a major cause of blindness, bladder cancer, and cancers of the
pancreas? Or cancers of the human breast?33 We need better measures of
this and other kinds of ignoranceagnometric indicators that will tell us
how many people dont know X, Y, or Z.
A new element in the tobacco story over the past twenty years or so
has been the industrys hiring of historians to tell the tobacco story in a
way that jurors might find sympathetic. Historians are employed to point
out that correlation does not imply causation, that history is messy, that
we must be careful in judging the past, that good history may even require our not judging the past, and so forth.34 Historians are most often
brought into tobacco trials to testify to what is known as state of the art
and common knowledgebasically the science of the times, and what
people knew about the hazard. As of 2005 at least thirty-six academic
historians had testified under oath for the industrywhereas only three
had testified against (myself, Louis Kyriakoudes, and Allan Brandt).35 The
industrys goal has been to control the history of tobacco just as earlier
theyd controlled the science of tobacco. A typical instrument in this was
Philip Morriss Project Cosmic, an effort launched in 1987 to create an
extensive network of scientists and historians from all over the world
to write the history of drug use.36 David Musto of Yale, David Harley of
Oxford, John Burnham of Ohio State, and a number of others were approached to write articles for the industry to see to it that the beneficial
effects of nicotine are more widely understood.37 Mustos work was considered particularly useful for presenting a moderate view of substance
use in the media.38 Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid to Cosmic research directors; Musto alone received nearly $500,000.39 Grantees published on the history of tobacco without ever acknowledging the
industrys support. David Harley, for example, published an article on The
Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy in the Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, thanking a certain Daniel Ennis for encouraging my interest
in this topic.40 Nowhere does he mention that Enniss encouragement
took the form of large piles of cash from Philip Morris.
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agnotology: a missing t er m

There is an interesting sense in which the most common definitions of

expertise in recent tobacco trials are biased in favor of the defense. Biased,
because in restricting their focus to the state of the art, a historian might
fail to recognize the state of the deception. If there is a diversity of views
on tobacco as a cause of cancer, what fraction of that diversity has been
created by the industry itself? Similar problems confront our grappling
with the extent to which tobacco harms were common knowledge. We
need to know what people knew, but also what they didnt know (and
why not). Common ignorance must be explored and understood as
much as common knowledge.
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,41 organization of friendly
research for publication in popular magazines, and myriad additional
projects from the dark arts of agnotology. Tremendous amounts of money
have been thrown into this effort, which the industrys own lawyers have
(privately) characterized as a form of studied ignorance.42 The industry
eventually recognized itself as a manufacturer of two separate, but codependent products: cigarettes and doubt. As Tobacco Institute VP Fred Panzer
put it in a 1971 memo, the industrys goal was to create doubt about the
health charge without actually denying it.43 Brown & Williamson officials
had earlier confessed (internally) that doubt is our product,44 and in the
1980s Philip Morris responded to the threat of environmental tobacco
smoke (ETS) by formulating as their number one strategy objective: to
maintain doubt on the scientific front about ETS.45
There is no central tenet in tobacco industry agnotology, however; their
philosophy is opportunistic, and always subordinate to the goal of selling
cigarettes and winning lawsuits, usually via stalling tactics known in the
business as sand in the gears.46 Cigaretteers will jump from being Popperian to constructivist as it suits them; they love to argue that no number of
experiments can verify a theory, but they also know how to hammer away
at the language of a claim until it falls to pieces. (Recall the Academy for
Tobacco Studies scientist in Thank You for Smoking who could disprove
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robert n. proc tor

gravity.) And on the question of demonstrating harms, the industrys standards for proof are so high that nothing in this world could satisfy. More
research is always needed, a benefit of the doubt is always granted, as
if cigarettes were on trial and innocent until proven guilty. The industry
loves this form of the null hypothesis: they start by assuming no harm
done, and then fail in their feeble efforts at falsification. Similar strategies
have been used by other industries to disprove hazards of lead, asbestos,
and the like; and petrochemical and neoconservative doubters of global
warming have learned a lesson or two from the tobacco doubt mongers
(as Naomi Oreskes shows in her contribution to this volume).47
Military Secrecy
Tobacco duplicity is notorious, but deliberate ignorance also comes from
numerous other sources, such as military classification. Estimates are that
a quarter of the worlds technical personnel have some kind of military
clearance; there are secret scientific facts, secret scientific methods, secret
scientific societies, secret scientific journals, and (probably) secret laws of
nature. Military men dont always want to keep secrets from themselves,
so firewalls are established to allow a community of cognoscenti with
clearance to meet in private to discuss classified matters. The National
Security Agency, for example, maintains an Internet firewalled from the
outside world, as do some of our larger private corporations. The Manhattan Project in World War II (to make an atomic bomb) set the stage for
much of Americas postwar secret research; the project diverted much of
the countrys scientific talent and the name itself was a deception, as was
Britains comparable Tube Alloys Project. Nuclear technologies have
been clothed in secrecy from quite early on: the very existence of plutonium, for example, was classified for several years after its discovery, and
words like radiation and radioisotope were not supposed to be bandied about. Neither word was mentioned in the first 200 articles written
on the atom bomb.48
Atomic secrecy was also the rationale for entire scientific disciplines
going underground, with code names devised for sensitive topics. The field
of Health Physics, for example, has its origins in the need to explore the
novel hazards of atomic radiation, with the name being deliberately kept
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agnotology: a missing t er m

vague to disguise the fact that projects were underway to explore health
and safety in the nuclear workplace.
The whole point of secrecy in this realm is to hide, to feint, to distract, to deny access, and to monopolize information. Global positioning
system locations are tweaked to keep sensitive locations (for example,
the White House) unknowableand so untargetableand entire cities
have been erased from maps or never drawn in. The National Security
Agency is larger and more secretive even than the Central Intelligence
Agency (NSA = No Such Agency)49 and the National Reconnaissance
Office is more shadowy still, and even better funded. Most secret would
be those offices and operations we in the outside world know nothing
about. Classified research in the United States is hidden in the so-called
Black Budget, which currently exceeds the amounts funded for education
and many other social services. In November of 2005, Mary Margaret
Graham, deputy director of National Intelligence at the CIA, revealed the
total U.S. intelligence budget to be $ 44 billion per annum.50
The impact of military secrecy on science has been profound, affecting nearly every branch of knowledge. An interesting case concerns the
seafloor stripes discovered during World War II. These large, linear, magnetic anomalies are caused by a combination of seafloor spreading and
periodic reversals in the Earths magnetic field. They were also useful in
locating enemy German (and later Russian) submarines, assisting in the
scanning for underwater metallic objects. Seafloor stripes were important
in the acceptance of continental drift, but their locations and even their
existence was classified until the 1950s. Had these been openly available
to the scientific community, the theory of continental drift could have been
accepted years before it was. Secrecy in this instance produced ignorance
in the form of delayed knowledge.51
There are other examples of military agnogenesis. Military-sponsored
research in the 1940s led to early predictions of global warming and the
melting of the polar ice caps; the guardians of military secrecy kept this
quiet, however, and the topic was not widely and openly discussed.52
Climate science has suffered new kinds of agnotology in recent years, as
Bush administration strategists have tried to keep the question of anthropogenic global warming open.53 As with tobacco industry apologetics,
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robert n. proc tor

calls for more research on climate change have served as an effective

stalling tactic: the strong evidence of warming is denied, using the pretence
of a quest for rigor as a trick to delay action. Calls for precision can play
out as prevarication.
Military research has more often generated ignorance by passive agnogenesis: we have many examples where military funding has pushed certain areas, leaving others to languish. Carbon-14 research, for example,
was heavily supported by the military as part of nuclear isotope research
(Libbys work), whereas oxygen isotope analysis languished underfunded.
Science responds to funding opportunities, which means that ignorance
can be maintained or created in certain areas simply by defunding.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, federal funding for solar energy research was zeroed out. Semiconductor studies that could have
pushed forth knowledge in this realm were transferred to areas such as
the hardening of silicon chips to resist the neutron flux from an atomic
blast. Solar technology know-how suffered from this loss of funding;
ignorance here resulted from a decision to emphasize fossil fuels over renewable energy sources.
v i r t u o u s i g n o r a n c e ? n o t k n ow i n g
as resistance or moral caution
The prospect sounds anathema: how could anyone want to hold back the
progress of science? Knowledge is the light, why bathe in the dark? Once
past the bluster, however, there are obviously many things we dont want
to knowand many more wed rather have others not know about us. Ive
mentioned the right to privacy, but there are other realms where less is
more when it comes to knowledge, including scientific knowledge.
We know this from popular sayings, as in the notion that it is not always easy to put some genies back in the bottle. Knowledge escapes,
that wed rather have confined or relegated to history. This would include
many technologies and bodies of skill: if not those surrounding plutonium
or uranium, then perhaps the know-how involved in torture, or the manufacture of neutron bombs, or some of our more horrific bioweapons. People
can work to undo rotten knowledge; that is one goal of education, but it is
also the principal rationale for military classification, in that powers that
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agnotology: a missing t er m

be dont want dangerous knowledge falling into the wrong hands.

Universities routinely bar many kinds of researchresearch with strings
attached, for example, or research that involves certain kinds of risks for
human or animal subjects, or research of a sort intended solely for profit,
and so forth. Many universities bar research that is classified for military
purposes, along with research seen to involve certain kinds of conflict of
interest. UCSFs Energy Institute wont take money from oil and gas interests, for example, and has been struggling over whether to allow projects
funded by the tobacco industry. Rationales for such restrictions differ in
each instance, but one overarching theory is that certain kinds of research
will produce knowledge that could be biased or undesirable.
Scientific journals often have other kinds of restrictions. There are the
familiar restrictions of disciplinarity and rhetoric, but projects receiving
funding from certain sources are sometimes barred, as are research objects
of illegitimate provenance (notably in archaeology). The entire notion of
research ethics presumes that ignorance in certain situations is preferable to knowledge by improper means. The American Medical Association
in 1996 recommended that scientific journals refuse to publish research
funded by the tobacco industry,54 and there are calls now for history journals to do the samegiven the covert industry support for such publications.55 Historians havent yet had much experience limiting research from
such sources, and few professional journals require disclosure of potential
conflicts of interest. That could change, as historians realize that their research can be bought as easily as any other kind. Disclosures and even
transparency are double-edged swords, however, as shown by the tobacco industrys work to draft and organize passage of the Data Access
Act of 1998 and the Data Quality Act of 2000. The new laws allow the
industry to obtain the raw data of anyone publishing any kind of scientific
or medical study using federal funds; the industry pushed for legislation
of this sort to allow it reanalyze and reinterpret (that is, look for flaws in)
research suggesting a tobacco hazard of one sort or another.56 Philip Morris employed Multinational Business Services and other front organizations to push through these lawsover objections from both the National
Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. The bottom line: the seemingly noble goal of transparency can
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robert n. proc tor

be an instrument in the service of organized duplicity.

One key principle of research ethicsas of ethics more generallyis
that not all things are worth knowing at any cost. Many kinds of scientific experiments are barred, either legally or less formally, which amounts
to a tolerance for ignorance in realms where the costs of gaining knowledge are judged to be too high. An interesting example of deliberate refusal of knowledge is the agreement by most journals of archaeology
not to publish artifacts without an explicit and acceptable provenance
demonstrating that the object in question was obtained either legally in
recent years, or illegally prior to some agreed-on cutoff point. Estimates
are that as many as half of all artifacts in museum collections have been
obtained illegallythough legal standards have changed considerably in
this realm over time. The logic for the policy is that unrestricted publication will encourage looting, since publication is part of the process by
which artifacts obtain value (via both certification and publicity). Different archaeological traditions regard this question of how to treat lootings
very differently. Contextualists (aka dirt archaeologists, who study
sites laid out in square meters) tend to take the hard line, arguing that artifacts without proper provenance should not be published. (Some even
imply they should be destroyed, in the same way that Daniel Arap Moi
burned all that ivory.) Linguistic archaeologistsdecoderstend to be
more tolerant, pointing out that all evidence available must be taken into
account if translations (of Mayan stelae, for example) are to be possible.
These different epistemic traditions have different attitudes toward looting: dirt archaeologists tend to value context, the first victim of looting,
whereas philologists tend to value comparative analysis of series of great
artifacts, which often requires access to artifacts in private collections.
The two traditions have different understandings of the costs of certain
kinds of knowledge and ignorance.
If knowledge is power (which it sometimes is but not always), then to
dismantle certain kinds of power may require the reintroduction of bodies of ignorancehence impotencein that realm. History is full of such
undoings, the deliberate abandonment of skills to improve some way of
life. And were not just talking Amish virtues: Who now knows all the
techniques slave owners once possessed of how to control slaves? That is
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agnotology: a missing t er m

lost knowledge, as it should be, save perhaps for museums. Who could
lament the loss of knowledge of all the worlds ways to torture, the cognitive equivalent of smallpox stocks? Refusals of technology are often of this
sort. We often hear that you cant turn the clock back, an idea as absurd
as the notion that thieves cannot be brought to justice. It is not only for
foolishness that technologies have been avoided, refused, or abandoned.
In Ireland, the eel fishermen of Lough Neagh no longer fish with powerdriven nets; a decision was made in the 1960s to restrict all fishing in the
lake to hand-drawn nets, to sustain the diminishing stocks. Leaf blowers
are being banned in many communities, and many of us look forward to
the day when doctored monocrop lawns will be seen as pathology. The
Japanese lived for more than a hundred years without the gun. Protests
against novel technologies are often lumped under the ridiculous rubric
of luddism, a term too often forgotten to have often sprung from moral
complaints with good reasons. Iain Boal in his forthcoming Long Theft
shows how the breaking of looms in the early decades of the nineteenth
century gave rise to the modern industrial strike (for better working conditions); protests against technologies and knowledge practices are rarely
the result of people fearing modernity in the abstract.
There are many other reasons people might not want to have all knowledge omnipresent all the time. Not everyone wants to know what kinds of
genetic diseases they (or their children) may be harboring in their genomes.
Archaeologists deliberately dont publish the location of certain excavation
sites, fearing looting (botanists do the same for new cactus finds), and some
ethnographers are publishing knowledge of certain biopharmaceuticals in
indigenous languages to give locals an edge against the multinationals.
Access to all kinds of information is limitedignorance is deliberately
createdfor more reasons than the moon has craters.
The lesson is one that should have been applied in all of the recent hysteria over the myriad vulnerabilities of Americans to terrorist attack. The
nightly news for months was full of exposs of how this or that bridge or
granary could be bombed or poisoned, in a gargantuan paranoid proclamation of national victimhood. News about potential threats and
security gaps arguably did more to give people worries (and ideas) than
to encourage any truer sense (and reality) of safety; there is such a thing
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robert n. proc tor

as dangerous knowledge, things we dont need to know. Total Information Awareness is not for everyone.
some questions
There are lots of ways to think about ignoranceas tragedy, as crime, as
provocation, as strategy, as stimulus, as excess or deprivation, as handicap, as defense mechanism or obstruction, as opportunity, as guarantor
of judicial neutrality, as pernicious evil, as wondrous innocence, as inequity or relief, as the best defense of the weak or the common excuse of
the powerful, and so forth (see Box 2). There are surely as many ways to
think about ignorance as of knowledge, with the sociology just as intricate
in both instances. There are lots of different kinds of ignorance, and lots
of different reasons to expose it, undo it, deplore it, or seek it.
Here some questions for further reflection: What other kinds of work
does ignorance do? How else is it created, via what other kinds of inattention, disinterest, calculation, resistance, tradition, or distraction? And
when does knowledge create ignorance? Wes Jackson has called the modern
university an engine of distraction; how does pursuit of certain kinds
of knowledge produce such distractions? Is ivory tower reclusion required for certain kinds of knowledge production? How do disinterests
and apathies come into being, and what patterns of competence or disability are thereby brought into being?
We tend to think of ignorance as something negative, but when can it
become a virtue? Or an imperative? The philosopher John Rawls has championed a veil of ignorance as a kind of ethical method: we are supposed to
imagine ourselves not knowing where we ourselves will figure in an ethical
situation; ignorance of how we personally might gain is supposed to guarantee a kind of neutrality and therefore balance in judging such situations.
We find something similar in the courtroom, where jurors are supposed to
be ignorant of the particulars of the crime they are evaluatingversus prior
to the seventeenth century, when jurors were supposed to know as much as
possible about the case in question. (Jurors were only later clearly separated
from witnesses, the theory being that ignorance will prevent bias.) Knowledge here is interestingly attached to bias, ignorance to balance.
And how important is the genesis of ignorance for modern corpo24

agnotology: a missing t er m

rations? Many companies cultivate ignorance as a kind of insurance

policy: if what you dont know cant hurt you, sometimes it is safer not
to know. Document retention policies of many companies were revised
in the wake of the Master Settlement Agreement (1998), which forced
tens of millions of previously secret tobacco industry documents onto
the Internet. The traditional corporate lawyers trick of flooding a plaintiff with documents (aka dumping) backfired with the rise of the Internet and search engines, leading information holders to recognize the
dangers of a long paper trail. In the new millennium, many companies
have adopted email deletion policies to avoid leaving such trails (paper
or electronic), the theory again being that what you dont know cant
hurt you. (Though failure to keep accurate records has itself been used
in certain lawsuits, alleging destruction of documents.)
And what about in medicine, or the science of public health? Richard
Peto has argued that ignorance of a certain type is essential for progress
in the science of epidemiology. No one needed to know anything about
the biochemistry of cancer to realize that cigarettes were causing the disease; it was crucial to black box the things we didnt know, rather than
waiting paralyzed until knowledge had come in on every front.57 The tobacco industry has spread confusion on this point, pretending that every
last fact must be known about a disease before we can say what causes it.
John Snows removing the handle from the water pump at Charing Cross
is the contrary lessonwarts and all: sometimes we know enough to act,
despite oceans of ignorance. Ignorance must be productive or virtuous (not
the same thing) in many other contextswhat are they? The history of
discovery is littered with fertile mistakesthink of Columbus, emboldened
to cross the Atlantic by virtue of an overly conservative estimate for the
size of the globe. What other examples are there of fertile ignorance?
And when does ignorance beget confidence, arrogance, or timidity?
Charles Darwin once wrote that ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those
who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will
never be solved by science.58 Darwin implies that knowledge leads us to
a kind of productive humilitybut how often is this true? His point is not
the Socratic one, that the more you know the more you realize how little
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robert n. proc tor

you know, but rather that the more you know, the more you realize that
science can go forward, trouncing ignorance. George Gaylord Simpson has
taken a different tack, claiming that our capacity for ignorance is central
to what it means to be human: Man is among many other things, the
mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much
more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much
less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate
black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform
miracles for them.59 To be human is to be ignorant, apparently.
Crucial also is: ignorance for whom? And against whom? Ignorance
has a history and is always unevenly distributed, the geography of ignorance has mountains and valleys. Who is ignorant and why, and to what
extent? How can we develop better agnometric indicators? What keeps
ignorance in one place, while it evaporates in some other? And which
among our myriad ignorances will be tolerated or combated?
Many of these same questions can be asked about knowledge since,
like ignorance, it occupies space and takes us down one path rather than
another. Knowledge, too, has a face, a house, and a pricethere are people
attached, institutions setting limits, and costs in the form of monies or opportunities lost. Decisions of what kind of knowledge we want to support
are also decisions about what kinds of ignorance should remain in place.
s u m m a r i z i n g , t h e n : it is our hope that readers will be convinced that

there are a lot of good reasons to explore ignorance. There is surely quite
a lot of it, as much as we are willing to let our arrogance acknowledge.
Agnotology could be a challenge to hubris, if there is modesty in learning
how deeply ignorant we are. Think of the countless different ways it is
generated: by ingesting lead or by watching TV, or by fatigue or fear or
isolation or poverty or any of the other myriad experiences that deaden
human life. Think of ignorance generated by failures of the body, or failures to fund education, or free access to bogus information, or practices
and policies that enlarge secrecy or prevarication or compartmentalization. People have extracted very different things from different kinds of
unknowns, and will no doubt continue to mix suspect with admirable
reasons for letting those flourish or disappear.
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agnotology: a missing t er m

note on the coining of the

t e r m a g n o t o l o g y
Some time into this project, I learned that there already was a word that has
been used to designate the study of ignorance, albeit with a quite different
slant from how we shall be using the term. Apart from being obscure and
somewhat inharmonious, agnoiology has often been taken to mean the
doctrine of things of which we are necessarily ignorant in some profound
metaphysical sense. My hope for devising a new term was to suggest the
opposite, namely, the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and
the non-knownand 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.
Coinage for science terms in Anglophonia is conventionally from the
Greek, so that is where he started. Ignorance in Greek really has two forms,
agnoia, meaning want of perception or knowledge, and agnosia, meaning a state of ignorance or not knowing, both from gnosis (with a long
o or omega) meaning knowledge, with the privative (negating) a- prefix. (We didnt look for a harmonious negation of episteme.) Alternative
designations for the study of ignorance could have been agnosiology, or
agnarology (using the Latin compounding rule) or even agnoskology, designating more properly a study of the unwillingness or inability to learn,
from gignosko (with both os as omegas), the first-person singular present
indicative active form of the verb meaning to know.
Iain crafted agnotology from among these possible options, using gno
as the root (meaning to know), a as the negating prefix, a t added as
the marker of the participial (yielding gnot), and -ology as the denominative suffix. We chose -ology largely on phonaesthemic grounds, with the
logos-derived suffix lying roughly in the midrange of the hubris continuum, avoiding alternatives such as the more archaic agnonomy, the vivid
yet micro-tainted agnoscopy (with its tilt to molecular coproscopy), the
Latin-Greek mongrel ignorology, the Anglo-Saxon romantic yet overly
quaint ignorance-lore (Lorraine Dastons tongue-in-cheek suggestion),
the hyperempirical ig- or agnotometry (or -metrics), and the self-marginalizing ignorance science or ignorance studies, with its taint for those
who scoff that if theres science in the title, it isnt one.
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robert n. proc tor

We had originally spelled our new term with two as (agnatology)

to avoid having people elongating and accenting the second o (as in agnostic or ignoble), recognizing also that vowels are essentially fillers in
written language, following Voltaires famous maxim that etymology is
a science in which the consonants count for very little, and the vowels
for even less. (Try replacing all vowels in a text with the letter a, e, or i;
and of course there are many languages that drop them altogether, such
as Hebrew.) Protests over this second a have come from a number of
quarters, among these a few biologists who have insinuated that we are
infringing on the study of jawless (agnathic) fish. More serious was the
objection that agnate was already a word, meaning relative (from ad
gnatus). In the spirit of scholarly harmony we decided to rechristen our
neologism agnotology, recognizing that while the meanings of words lie
only in their use, their use can also depend on how and for what ends
they are created.
some famous quotations about ignorance
Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.
Confucius (551 bc 479 bc)
The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.
Publilius Syrus, Maxims (c. 100 bc)
To know that we know what we know, and to know that we
do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543)
Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom.
Hugo De Groot (15831645)
Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain, December 2, 1887
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant (18851981)
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Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell, 1984
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable
in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken (18801956)
Ignorance is king, many would not prosper by its abdication.
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Its innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesnt.
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotics Notebook (1960)
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our
ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963)
Reports that say that something hasnt happened are always interesting
to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things
we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is
to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are
also unknown unknownsthe ones we dont know we dont know.
And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free
countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing,
February 12, 2002

notes
1. The reference is to Harvards Philosophy 253.
2. A Google search of December 2001 yielded 145,000 hits for epistemology, including
objectivist, subjectivist, virtue, analytic, genetic, affective, iceberg, and Chicana feminist.
For the gamut, see http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/e-page.htm.
3. Two solid exceptions: Peter Wehling, Weshalb weiss die Wissenschaft nicht, was sie nicht
weiss? Forschungsperspektiven einer Soziologie des wissenschaftlichen Nichtwissens,
http://www.sciencepolicystudies.de/wehling%20Expertise.pdf; and Michael Smithson,
Toward a Social Theory of Ignorance, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 15
(1985): 151172. An earlier discussion in the functionalist mood can be found in W. E.
Moore and M. M. Tumin, Some Social Functions of Ignorance, American Sociological
Review, 14 (1949): 787795.
4. The philosopher Paula Driver argues that one version of modesty consists in being
ignorant of ones actual merits. Charity can similarly consist in not noticingor failing
29

robert n. proc tor

5.

6.

7.

8.
9.
10.

11.

12.
13.
14.

15.
16.
17.

18.
19.
20.

to be aware ofthe faults of others; see her Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Harry Marks, Misunderstanding Pellagra: Gender, Race and Political Economy in Early20th-Century Epidemiology, History of Science Colloquium, Welch Medical Library,
JHMI (2001).
Fetal alcohol syndrome was discovered circa 1900 and then forgotten with the discrediting
of its eugenics scaffolding; see Philip J. Pauly, How Did the Effects of Alcohol on
Reproduction Become Scientifically Uninteresting? Journal of the History of Biology,
29 (1996): 128.
David Reich, Building Superman, review of Nicholas Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis
Galton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), in the New York Times Book
Review, February 10, 2002: 16.
So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge
the hidden cause of things (Kepler, 15711630).
Malcolm Ritter, Americans Show They Dont Know Much about Science, AP, June
16, 2002 (based on an NSF-funded survey).
August Comte makes this explicit in his Cours de philosophie positiv (18301842); see
Auguste Comte and Positivism, the Essential Writings, ed. Gertrud Lenzer (New York:
Harper and Row, 1975), 73, 94, 465474, and 84.
This is Robert K. Mertons idea of specified ignorance; see his Three Fragments from a
Sociologists Notebooks: Establishing the Phenomenon, Specified Ignorance, and Strategic
Research Materials, Annual Review of Sociology, 13 (1987): 128. Mertons point is
really only that questions not asked are questions not answered, and that scientists need
to make what they dont know explicit as a first step toward supplanting that ignorance
with knowledge (10).
R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith, The Encyclopedia of Medical Ignorance: Exploring
the Frontiers of Medical Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984).
Smithson, Toward a Social Theory of Ignorance, 153.
Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan, The Gulf War: A Study of the Media,
Public Opinion, and Public Knowledge (Research Report. Centre for the Study of
Communication, Doc. #P-8, February 1991).
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935),
in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 238.
David Dickson, Weaving a Social Web, Nature, 414 (2001): 587.
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (New York: New Republic, 1935), 70.
The idea of selective bias has fallen on hard times in recent sociology of science.
All science is said to be selective, so it becomes only trivially true to say that any
particular pattern of inquiry is selective, since it cannot have been otherwise. The
so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge also tended to regard the
social construction of ignorance (or error) as easy or trivial by comparison with
the social construction of truth.
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Random
House, 1990).
Mario Biagoli, From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review, Emergences, 12
(2002): 1145.

30

agnotology: a missing t er m

21. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, eds., Secrets of Nature: Astrology and
Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
22. W. R. Van Meter in his Putting False Faces on Formulas (Food Industries, October
1941, 4142) advised food chemists to disguise valuable formulas so that workmen
do not get wise to it and competitors cannot steal it. The idea is to use arbitrary units
of measurement and adopt coined names for ingredients (41).
23. William Poundstone, Big Secrets: The Uncensored Truth about All Sorts of Stuff You
Are Never Supposed to Know (New York: William Morrow, 1985).
24. See my Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Dont Know About
Cancer (New York: Basic Books, 1995), esp. p. 8n and Chapter 5 on Doubt is Our
Product.
25. The PR firm of Hill and Knowlton is often blamed, but Paul Hahn, president of the
American Tobacco Co., was surely involved; see my forthcoming Tobacco Holocaust.
Compare also my Cancer Wars, Chapter 5; Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Expert
Panels and Medical Uncertainty, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 19 (1991):
131134; and Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007),
159207.
26. See my Everyone Knew But No One Had Proof: Tobacco Industry Use of Medical History
Expertise in U.S. Courts, 19902002, Tobacco Control, 15 (2006): iv, 117125.
27. Kenneth Ludmerer, testimony in Boeken v. Philip Morris, Inc., et al., Superior Court of
California for the County of Los Angeles, Case No. BC 226593, Transcript of Proceedings,
vol. 31A, 5262.
28. The words deceive, misleading, fraud, and cognates appear 454 times with
reference to tobacco industry actions in Judge Gladys Kesslers Final Opinion in USA
v. Philip Morris et al. (August 18, 2006), online at http://www.tobaccolawcenter.org/
documents/FinalOpinion.pdf. The Court here notes that numerous acts of concealment
and deception were made intentionally and deliberately as part of a multifaceted,
sophisticated scheme to defraud. The Court also concludes that From at least 1953
until at least 2000, each and every one of these Defendants repeatedly, consistently,
vigorouslyand falselydenied the existence of any adverse health effects from smoking.
Moreover, they mounted a coordinated, well-financed, sophisticated public relations
campaign to attack and distort the scientific evidence demonstrating the relationship
between smoking and disease, claiming that the link between the two was still an open
question (330331).
29. The tobacco industry sometimes defends itself by suggesting that the public was never
convinced by its no proof of harm propaganda. During my expert deposition of
July 2002 for the plaintiffs in USA v. Philip Morris I was shown an industry document
from the 1970s suggesting that confidence in the industry was low by comparison with
medical and public health groups. The industrys inference was essentially: yes we lied,
but nobody believed us. Fraud, it seems, is not fraud if no one believes you.
30. Cited in Jones, Day, Reavis, and Pogues 450-page Corporate Activity Project (1986),
available online at http://www.tobacco.org/resources/documents/jonesday1.html, 390.
Clarence Cook Little was scientific director of TIRC but took orders from the TI on
this occasion.
31. Louis Harris, Most Still Doubt Cigarettes are Major Cause of Cancer, Washington
Post, January 2, 1967, Bates 500323778.
32. Use of Tobacco: Practices, Attitudes, Knowledge, and Beliefs. United StatesFall 1964
31

robert n. proc tor

and Spring 1966 (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare: July 1969), 52,
68.
33. California EPA, Proposed Identification of Environmental Tobacco Smoke as a Toxic
Air Contaminant (Sacramento: California EPA, 2003).
34. See my Should Medical Historians be Working for the Tobacco Industry? Lancet, 363
(2003): 1174.
35. See my Everyone Knew But No One Had Proof, iv117iv125.
36. Chronology and Development of Project Cosmic (Philip Morris), 1988, Bates:
2023919844-9907; Project Cosmic, Feb. 18, 1992, Bates: 2040573257-3270. Documents
with Bates numbers (litigation codes) are searchable online at http://legacy.library.
ucsf.edu/.
37. Plans for the Smoking Research Project (Philip Morris), 1988, Bates: 20012601310136.
38. Chronology and Development of Project Cosmic, Bates: 2023919844-9847.
39. Project Cosmic: Budget/Spending Status, February 1991, Bates: 2023160927.
40. David Harley, The Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy: Puritanism, James I, and
the Royal Physicians, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 67 (1993): 28. Harleys
article conveys this message of a timeless controversy that may never be resolved;
Musto similarly talked about a pendulum swinging from endorsement to condemnation
of drug use, with a periodicity of about seventy years. This latter idea was picked up by
a number of science reporters (Gina Kolata, for example), none of whom recognized
the thesis as an industry concoction designed to make smoking seem natural and
inevitable.
41. Stanton A. Glantz, John Slade, Lisa A. Bero, Peter Hanauer, and Deborah E. Barnes,
eds., The Cigarette Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 171200.
42. Jones, Day, Reavis, and Pogue, Corporate Activity Project, 71.
43. Fred Panzer to Horace R. Kornegay, May 1, 1972, Bates: 87657703-7706.
44. Glantz et al., Cigarette Papers, 171.
45. Daniel J. Edelman, INFOTAB ETS-Project: The Overall Plan, March 12, 1987, Bates:
2022934011-4024, p. 8.
46. Craig L. Fuller, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Kathleen Linehan, Vice
President, Government Affairs, Presentation for the Board of DirectorsJune 24,
1992, June 24, 1992, Bates: 2047916010.
47. See Naomi Oreskes essay in this volume and George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the
Planet from Burning (London: Allen Lane, 2006); also my Cancer Wars, Chapter 5.
48. Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (New York:
Doubleday, 1993).
49. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on Americas Most Secret Agency (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
50. Scot Shane, Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence, New York Times, November 8,
2005.
51. Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American
Earth Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
52. Ronald E. Doel, Polar Melting When Cold War Was Hot, San Francisco Examiner,
October 3, 2000, A15.
53. Republican political strategist Frank Luntz prior to the November 2000 presidential
election warned party members that the scientific debate on global warming was closing

32

agnotology: a missing t er m

54.
55.
56.

57.
58.
59.

but not closed, and advised his party to be more aggressive in recruiting sympathetic
experts who would encourage the public not to rush to judgment before all the facts
are in. The stakes were clear: Should the public come to believe that the scientific
issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore,
you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue. Cited in
Heather Boonstra, Critics Charge Bush Mix of Science and Politics Is Unprecedented
and Dangerous, The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, May 2003, 2.
Tobacco-funded Research, AMEDNEWS.COM, July 22, 1996, at http://.ama-assn
.org/sci-pubs/amnews/amn_96/summ0722.htm [accessed January 2002].
See again my Should Historians Be Working for the Tobacco Industry?
Annamaria Baba, Daniel M. Cook, Thomas O. McGarity, and Lisa A. Bero, Legislating
Sound Science: The Role of the Tobacco Industry, American Journal of Public Health,
95 (2005): S2027; Rick Weiss, Data Quality Law Is Nemesis of Regulation,
Washington Post, August 16, 2004, p. A1.
Richard Peto, Ignorance in Cancer Research, in R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith,
eds., The Encyclopedia of Medical Ignorance (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984), 129133.
Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (1871) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981), 3.
George Gaylord Simpson, This View of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1964), viii.

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