Agnotology

1. Origin, etymology and tools: 
2. Cognitive pathways of induced ignorance: 
3. Different fields of action of agnotology: 

Can smoking cause lung cancer? Several studies say no!  

Is climate change a reality? There is no proof that humans are responsible for it!  

Sugar is not harmful because it is a plant!   

If these statements make you shudder, welcome to agnotology! 

Origin, etymology and tools: 

While it is true that induced ignorance is a practice that has existed since ancient times, its production through scientific arguments and supports is typical of the 20th century. The main objective of this ‘counter-science’ is to sow doubt, to produce and spread strategic and collective ignorance based on a meticulous knowledge of the management of perception and human cognitive pathways. Ignorance, said Catherine II of Russia, guarantees the submission of the people. 

Both the strategies employed for such purposes and the study of them are called agnotology, a neologism composed of the privative prefix ‘a’ and the words ‘gnosis’ and ‘logia’ which mean respectively knowledge and science in Greek.    

The real interest in agnotology began in the early 1980s when science historian Robert Neel Proctor had access to a document from the tobacco company Brown & Williamson called ‘Smoking and Health Proposal’. It detailed the strategies and tactics used by the company to fight against anti-smoking forces. These included the production of studies citing viral risks, familial predispositions and other reasons to hide the cause-effect relationship between smoking and lung cancer. 

From there, Procter focuses on the analysis of the different manifestations of the cultural production of ignorance and doubt, their entertainment and propagation. However, it was not until 2003 that this concept burst into the public debate at a colloquium held at the University of Pennsylvania with the participation of other illustrious epistemologists such as Londa Schiebinger and Peter Galison. It was not only a matter of elaborating a taxonomy of ignorance, Proctor said at the time, but also of developing tools to understand how and why various forms of knowledge have not come into existence, were deferred or neglected, at different points in history. 

For such purposes, several tools that agnotology has as objects of study are usually resorted to. These include: 

-Disinformation: Fake news, for example. 

-State secrets and secrecy in general. 

-The theft of information. 

-Destruction of documents and evidence. 

-Denial of agendas. 

-Disinterest in or neglect of certain issues or topics. 

-Doubts and controversies surrounding a subject or person. 

Cognitive pathways of induced ignorance: 

As mentioned above, contemporary induced ignorance is based on a thorough understanding of human cognitive pathways. To put it another way: Why do today's societies doubt everything despite an unprecedented abundance of scientific knowledge? Is there a profuse tendency towards ignorance? Is there not a mass, herd effect? Do we not expect how others think and react in order to do so ourselves? 

The reason for this propensity towards consensual ignorance lies in the existence of certain mechanisms, two in particular, which the ignorance factory exploits to reinforce some beliefs and eliminate others: 

1- Cognitive bias: Or the intellectual mechanism that allows us to construct our beliefs and deliberately limit our knowledge in order to satisfy ourselves. There are about 25 cognitive biases, the best known of which is the confirmation bias, i.e. giving more importance to information that corroborates what we already thought, which means that we are active in this fabrication of ignorance. 

2-Cognitive dissonance: This occurs when there is a conflict between values and behaviour. In such a situation, there is a certain proclivity towards denial of our behaviour or involuntary change of our values. In other words: We lie to ourselves in order to justify our behaviour.  

Different fields of action of agnotology: 

1-Historical agnotology: the aim of which is to conceal historical facts that contest the legitimacy, credibility and domination of those in power in a country. Such is the case of the financing of fascism and Nazism by the great German, Italian and French industrial fortunes or Francoism in Spain. Another case is to conceal the involvement of certain countries and spheres in crimes and atrocities such as slavery and colonisation, to discredit historical figures, to favour amnesia and to format history.  

2-Ideological agnotology: it is about prohibiting or making it difficult for citizens to understand the causes of natural phenomena. This is how the Aristotelian ideology worked in Greece with the thesis of Aristarchus, the church with Copernicus and Galileo, the creationists of all religions with Darwin's theory, or the ideologists of ‘scientism’ who believe that science can solve everything and hide the harmful effects of certain technologies. Religion has also been instrumentalised in many situations to deepen people's ignorance of the real causes of their misery and domination. A recent case is that of right-wing ideologues who keep repeating that climate change is the work of communists. 

3-Economic agnotology: this is essentially based on: 

• Covering up the harmful effects of a product or a technology. Such is the case with the strategies developed by the tobacco, pharmaceutical, food, alcohol, plastic, pesticide, mobile phone, nuclear energy, etc. industries. 
• Imposing certain secrets such as manufacturing, commercial, banking, defence or administrative secrets that have an impact on economic activity. 

4- Political agnotology: this works through: 

• The concealment of the real reasons for certain military interventions or economic sanctions against certain countries. Ideological or human rights reasons are often advanced to conceal the real economic objectives.  
• The concealment of political decisions that run counter to a state's official discourse. For example, in November 2014, France and the EU did not vote for the UN resolution on the fight against the glorification of Nazi racism. This scandalous abstention was not reported in the media. 
• The opacity surrounding the cost of military interventions.  
• The mimicry over the sale of arms used in the repression of civilian populations. 
• The concealment of agreements and commitments with dictatorial regimes. 
• The masking of the consequences of the economic policies of multinationals on human lives. 

5-Scientific agnatology: this is related to the neoliberal programme of privatisation of science that began decades ago in the USA. The aim of this privatisation is to completely dissociate most of the functions of scientific research from the educational functions to which they were coupled for much of the 20th century. According to the historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski, the main lines of this neoliberal programme are: the ebb of public funding, the dissolution of the scientific author, the contraction of research agendas to meet the needs of commercial actors, a greater role for markets in settling intellectual disputes, the reinforcement of intellectual property to commercialise knowledge, thus slowing down the production and dissemination of science.   

After this brief review of the different types of agnotology, let us now take a look at the strategies and actions carried out in three main areas that work closely together to maintain the hegemony of a certain economic model and the people and institutions that represent it. These areas are science, politics (including defence and surveillance) and the media.  

A-A scientific level:  

The main objective of everything that is forged in this environment is to slow down or prevent research likely to show the harmfulness of a certain product or technology. The simplest technique is obviously secrecy. But if a whistleblower or a consumer association points out the danger of a product, the incriminated company uses different strategies to sow doubt, and what better strategy than the use - or rather the manipulation - of science, which is supposed to provide evidence and enjoys a great deal of credibility? 

It is therefore not surprising to see the public research budget dwindling for decades and the proliferation of the ‘funding effect’, which stipulates that it is possible to predict the outcome of a study to 70% depending on who is funding it. 

It is also important to note that 100% of the capital of certain scientific journals is held by certain industries whose representatives sit on the reading and editorial committees. This is not to say that all researchers are corrupt, some even do not hesitate to position themselves on the side of the whistleblowers. 

Strategies commonly used at the scientific level include: 

*The production of unsafe scientific reports in order to create doubt, the promotion of diversionary research in order to bring out one or more other reasons behind the danger of a given product (a virus, for example, to explain the cancers caused by tobacco). Thus, the company can instrumentalise science by mobilising credible but corrupt researchers called ‘project killers’. 

• Fund think tanks that pay scientists to seek allegations against their detractors. 
• Sponsoring the organisation of conferences. 
• Encouraging more and more research to give the illusion that there is still debate among scientists on an issue and thus perpetuate doubt. 
• Flooding the media with debates which, under the pretext of objectivity, present two contradictory points of view without taking sides. 

B-Political level: certain strategies are used: 

• Lobbying in parliaments and centres of legislation and political decision-making (the extension of the use of glycophosate by the EU until 2030 as the latest case). 
• The concealment of the extent of the transfer of wealth created by workers to shareholder capital. 
• The concealment of the power of influence of certain wealthy families over political personnel and state institutions. 
• The concealment of the control exercised by the ruling class over certain administrations and state apparatuses which are supposed to enjoy their own autonomy. 
• The concealment of corruption and conflicts of interest. 
• The opacity surrounding the existence of strong links between the ruling class and the extreme right.  
• The entertainment of the fog surrounding the system of surveillance and control of the population and the agreements between the state and private groups to exercise this role.  

C-At the level of social networks and the media:  

A new way of manipulating citizens, fake news, is born with social networks.  

In the final chapter of Science Mart, entitled ‘The new production of ignorance’, Mirowski analyses fake news not as a local disturbance but as a profound epistemological significance. The same author believes that unlike the old propaganda, but also unlike the emerging phenomena, creating confusion is already a political strategy.  

With social networks and fake news, the novelty consists in renouncing direct media manipulation and amplifying contradictions and confusion with the underlying idea of circumventing and skewing any sustainable mobilisation.  

In other words, it is about governing with noise and pandemonium, and we are not dealing with an emerging phenomenon but with an objective, that of transforming the permanent confusion of the masses into a source of profit, and making populations more docile in the face of the takeover of governments by the proxies of neoliberalism.  

And, as if that were not enough, there are now what are called deep fakes, videos that use artificial intelligence to say anything in the mouth of anyone. 

As for the Internet, while it is true that it is an impressive source of information, the number of divergent answers to the same subject only increases the user's perplexity. This is why, faced with such an abundance of information, we get so confused that we are overwhelmed by the overwhelming flow of information that follows.  

Moreover, on the Internet, anyone can give their opinion, those who know about the subject in question and those who don't. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. In fact, Wikipedia has become the most consulted source of information in the world today. Does it have a scientifically proven basis? The answer is no.  

How then do we distinguish the true from the false?  

Apart from the difficulty of going back to the source to validate or not the questioning, we move further and further away from the facts. Sensation is what prevails and counts, and truth becomes more and more controversial and problematic.  

This division between facts and opinions is very dangerous and heralds the entry into the phase of ‘agnotology 2.0’.  

Could we then say that digital contributes to leaving us in ignorance? 

Too much information kills information', says the French proverb.  

There is no doubt that we are also responsible for this disinformation by not verifying sources and corroborating facts. Like a rumour, we unwittingly spread disinformation to support our opinion. 

It is therefore urgent to question the reasons for this lack of knowledge.  

Is it because there is too much information for us to decipher, is it too difficult to trace back to the truth, or do we not develop enough critical thinking in our daily lives and in the education of our children?  

In any case, it is clear that this is a structural phenomenon related to the economic organisation of platforms that are part of a neoliberal political strategy of control via a new propaganda based on creating permanent confusion in order to achieve the frustrating and emasculating goal that lies behind the French proverb:  

‘Trop de la chose tue la chose’.