Robert N. Proctor Quotes
born 1954 United States
Robert Neel Proctor (born 1954) is an American historian of science and Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University.
Also known as: Robert Proctor
Random Robert N. Proctor quote
11 quotes
We seem to know a lot about knowledge. What is remarkable, though, is how little we know about ignorance.
Agnotology (2008)
We live in a golden age of ignorance, and Trump and Brexit are part of that.
It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences.
The ideal of value neutrality is not a single notion, but has arisen in the course of protracted struggles over the place that science should have in society.
Why do we know what we know and why don't we know what we don't know? What should we know and what shouldn't we know? How might we know differently?
Nazi philosophers also commonly expressed concerns about cruelty toward animals. In early 1933, Nazi representatives in the Prussian parliament called for legislation banning vivisection.
In March 1937 the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on the case of a farmer who had shot to death his sleeping son because the child was "mentally ill in a manner that threatened society"
The appropriate critique of [...] sciences is not that they are not "objective" but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective (that is true, or reliable) being in the service of interests.
There's a saying in the PR business that for every PhD there's an equal and opposite PhD. And if there's not one then you can create one through funding. And if you put a lot of money into manufacturing ignorance, it can actually work.
The fight is not just over the existence of climate change, it’s over whether God has created the Earth for us to exploit, whether government has the right to regulate industry
The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating (with his wife, Anna Schapire-Neurath) Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are "independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns."