Robert Neel Proctor (born 1954) is an American historian of science. He is Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University.[1] In 1999, he was the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry. He was a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University.
Proctor made the word "agnotology". Agnotology means writing untrue or misleading information about scientific data.[2][3]
'there is a lot more protectiveness than there used to be,' said Dr.Proctor, who is shaping a new field, the study of ignorance, which he calls agnotology. 'It is often safer not to know.'
This is about a society's choice between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford science historian Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance)