Agnotology 2.1: Narrowing our focus
“We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance.”
-Thomas Pynchon, 1984
What don’t you know? Why don’t you know it? Who is benefiting from your ignorance?
The hallmark of human society and culture, and potentially foundational to our success as a species, is our ability to share information. This ability is highlighted, of course, in language. But it’s also grounded in the inherently social nature of the human organism. Early in our development, we come to appreciate the support and cooperation of others – mom? siblings? – that scaffold our success. Much of the work in the sixties and seventies that aimed for efficient speech synthesis and recognition by computers came to rely on the Cooperative Principles put forward by Grice. For a time, success of that whole exercise rested on the assumption that in productive conversation, we tell each other what we need to know. No more and no less.
However, long before they leave the halls of an elementary school education, most children know there’s a lot more going on in active conversation than Grice’s Cooperative Principles can account for. People tell you what they WANT you to know. Humans have their own agendas, drives, motives. We learn early on that people are individually and variably trustworthy. We proceed at our own risk with our faith in the answers they provide to questions, or the information they offer spontaneously.
But we have somewhat different assumptions about print media. People write articles or books because they have a story they want to tell or information they want to disseminate. For most readers, there’s a willing suspension of disbelief and recognition that fiction is not fact, and conversely, that material purported to be fact is credible on its face. But, as suggested, authors may have an agenda. Reading carries with it the responsibility of critical evaluation of the material presented. Hence the cautionary ‘Don’t believe everything you read’.
Yet most of us assign a special status to journalism. An important tenet of our news establishment is that knowledge of some events or activities may be useful to the general public, even if they don’t know which questions to ask. It becomes the journalist’s responsibility to ask the right questions and publish the answers they have gathered. Hence, our ‘free press’ and a journalistic tradition that supports sharing generically and honestly any and all information that comes across the editor’s desk has become an expectation and assumption for most Americans.
But, even such an active search for information can yield only what people are willing to share. If a reporter asks pertinent and cogent questions, and manages to collect the appropriate information, there is still a potentially cumbersome further step to assure its dissemination. The entire exercise is costly. The journalist expects to get paid for time and expenses and the publishing process incurs additional charges. Who’s footing that bill? The end result is that the ‘free’ press isn’t free. An active decision can be made anywhere along the way to simply withhold the information.
In 1976, Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University founded ‘Project Censored’. The ongoing mission of the project is to ‘document systemic gaps and slant in corporate news coverage’. (Roth & Macek, 2022, p. 26). The resulting publications over the past 46 years have amassed a chilling array of news stories that are arguably injurious omissions from the public knowledge base. A number of these stories will be shared here in the coming months. In some cases, it may be obvious who has benefitted from these intentional gaps. In others, an important charge to readers is to identify the individual or organization that has censured the information or that may have benefitted from your ignorance.
Roth, A. L., & Macek, S. (2022). The top censored stories and media analysis of 2021-2022 – Introduction. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023. Huff, M. and Roth, A. L. editors. Seven Stories Press, New York, NY. 23-29.
