Ignorance

Duh:

A new book from Stanford University Press called Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance proposes that . . . we need rigorous and careful thinking about the structure and function and typology of cluelessness. The editors, Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, are both professors of history of science at Stanford University. Their volume is a collection of papers by various scholars, rather than a systematic treatment of its (perhaps inexhaustible) subject. But the field of agnotology seems to cohere around a simple, if challenging, point: Ignorance, like knowledge, is both socially produced and socially productive.

Ignorance is not simply a veil between the knower and the unknown. It is an active – indeed vigorous – force in the world. Ignorance is strength; ignorance is bliss. There is big money in knowing how to change the subject – by claiming the need for “more research” into whether tobacco contains carcinogens, for example, or whether the powerful jaws of dinosaurs once helped Adam and Eve to crack open coconuts.

The “more research” cliche is of course familiar to anyone in a field that claims to be even remotely empirical. There, obviously, the premise is that more research leads cumulatively to more sophisticated, better knowledge. In my introductory social science seminar, though, a fair number of students recognize — or at least think they recognize — that boilerplate, end-of-article nods to “more research” are just another species of bullshit, the sort of thing one offers up instead of a conclusive argument. Since I don’t really work in a field that relies on these rhetorical moves, I don’t feel too invested in defending them, but I usually try at least to contrast their (usually) sincerely curious spirit with the impulse behind the mendacious calls to “teach the controversy” where no such controversy actually exists.

In completely unrelated news, one of the chapters is titled “Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance.”

I just don’t even know how I can add to that.