Ignorance Unmasked
Robert N. Proctor, Londa Schiebinger (editors)
Paperback, 302 pages
9781503643956
Essays in the New Science of Agnotology
We live in an age of ignorance. This book offers a guide to how we got here—and how we might escape.
From obfuscations of climate science to the myriad deceptions inhering in language, Ignorance Unmasked explores how agnotology—the study of ignorance—can help us better grasp: Why don't we know what we don't know? What are the obstacles to knowledge, and how might those be overcome?
Ignorance has countless agents and authors; it gets deliberately manufactured and widely disseminated. In a provocative set of essays, this book engages climate change and public health, algorithmic amplification of misinformation, deep fakes and data obsolescence, the origins of free market fundamentalism and gun industry deceptions, along with the ignorance produced by military trauma, sugar and meat agnotology, environmental malfeasance, and the forgetting of the Nakba. It helps us better understand how and why knowledge gets erased, and how rectifying such ignorance can enlarge human liberties and planetary health.
Contributors: Nadia Abu El-Haj, Daniel Akselrad, Erik M. Conway, John Donohue, Hany Farid, Benjamin Franta, Peter Galison, Jennifer Jacquet, Caroline A. Jones, Robert Lustig, Naomi Oreskes, Robert N. Proctor, Rosemary Sayigh, Londa Schiebinger, and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Contents
1. Agnotology, Thirty Years in the Making
2. How the Most Important Fact of Global Warming Has Been Obscured
3. Preventing Unwanted Births Can Help Mitigate Climate Change—While Enlarging Human Liberties
4. Al-Fueled Ignorance, Confusion, and Profit
5. On Data Loss and Disappearance in Digital Societies
6. Law against Knowledge: Anti-Epistemology
7. Why We Wrongly Imagine Adam Smith as a Free Market Fundamentalist
8. Gun-Lobby Agnotology: Degrading the Truth about Firearms
9. Gluttony and Sloth? Personal Responsibility versus the True Cause of Obesity
10. How Big Meat Has Created and Legitimized Ignorance
11. On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba
12. Euphemism in the Architecture and Language of Treblinka
13. Hiram Powers, Black Agnotology, and Segregated Art History
14. "Civilian" Ignorance, American Militarism, and the Post-9/11 Wars