3 Agnotological Challenges: How to Capture the Production of Ignorance in Science

Agnotology is supposed to represent the downside of epistemology. The concept, as introduced by Robert Proctor (2008, 27–28) in 1992, denotes the active creation and preservation of ignorance. He examined the deliberate suppression or neglect of information for economic or political reasons. As Proctor (2006) argued, the danger involved in smoking tobacco had been intentionally concealed by the pertinent industry. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway expanded this approach to global warming. They diagnosed a systematic cover-up operation launched by right-wing political circles that was intended to hide the fact of anthropogenic climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2008; Oreskes 2015). The method used in both cases was generating doubt by placing the threshold of acceptance for unwelcome claims at such an exceedingly high level that scientists would forever be unable to overcome it. With regard to smoking, epidemiological studies were charged with not being controlled laboratory inquiries and thus untrustworthy. But laboratory experiments with rats were declared irrelevant because the effects might be different in humans. Nothing would eventually ever convince the critics; each and every finding or argument was countered by the demand for additional evidence. Doubt was created with the sole intention of preventing political bodies from taking action (Proctor 2008, 11–18; Michaels 2008, 91).