1 Introducing the Issues

Science has traditionally been billed as our foremost producer of knowledge. For more than a decade now, however, science has also been billed as an important source of ignorance. Indeed, historian of science Robert Proctor has coined a new term, agnotology, to refer to the study of ignorance, a new area of inquiry, and it turns out that much of the ignorance studied in this new area is produced by science (see, for example, Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Gross and McGoey 2015). The examples are numerous. Whether it be global warming, the health effects of smoking or environmental pollutants, the relation of processed foods to high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes, or the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs, in each case the public is confused, uninformed, or in some other way ignorant, and in each case the ignorance has been, to use Proctor's (2008, 8) phrase, “made, maintained, and manipulated” by science—by an increasingly politicized and commercialized science. According to this new approach, in short, ignorance is far more complex than previously thought. Indeed, ignorance is not just the void that precedes knowledge or the privation that results when attention focuses elsewhere. It is also—in fact, it is especially—something socially constructed: the confusion produced, for example, when special interests block access to information or even create misinformation.