Forbidden Knowledge: The Social Construction and Management of Ignorance

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Within the last 10 years historians of science such as Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Peter Galison, and Naomi Oreskes, have been promoting a new area of enquiry - Proctor calls it agnotology, the study of ignorance - which they suggest is of as much relevance to philosophers and social scientists and others as it is to historians. Indeed, the suggestion is that agnotology offers a new approach to the study of knowledge, an approach at least as complex and important as its more established sister, epistemology. In this course we shall focus especially on socially constructed ignorance - the kind exemplified by governmental secrecy and censorship, or industry-engineered confusion (think of the tobacco industry or the pharmaceutical industry), or the 'virtuous ignorance' that would ensue if certain kinds of research (think of race- and gender-related cognitive differences research) were no longer supported. This will lead us to consider the kinds of freedom of research and other social structures that need to be in place to support the legitimate quest for knowledge, and thence to the recognition that agnotological/epistemological questions are also, ultimately, political questions.