The Politics of Ignorance

One of the important ideas in the sociology of science is also one of the easiest to misunderstand: knowledge is socially produced. This does not mean that scientists simply make things up, it means something much more practical. Science is a human activity, it requires people, institutions, money, equipment, archives, universities, laboratories, communities and time. What we choose to investigate – and what we choose not to investigate – is therefore shaped by society. That means there is another side to the politics of knowledge, we construct knowledge, but we can also construct ignorance. This is the idea of agnotology: the study of how ignorance is produced, maintained and sometimes deliberately manufactured. The source text describes this as the consequence of science’s unavoidable selectivity: we look here rather than there, and every decision to investigate one thing means that something else receives less attention. The important question is therefore not – what do we know? It…