Embracing Refused Knowledge: The Turning Processes

Embracing refused knowledge implies a significant personal turn. This chapter addresses the most common characteristics of the biographical trajectories of experts and laypeople endorsing refused knowledge. It shows that such processes are not merely cognitive in nature but also emotional, behavioural, social and material. Moreover, they coincide rarely with a sudden change but are the gradual deepening of an attitude. The most significant drivers of such processes are then presented focusing on the triggering role played by specific health events, and on how medicine contributes to translating such events into ‘problems’ that only refused knowledge can effectively address. The chapter highlights that usually the transition is not driven by an anti-scientific attitude, but by a bitter criticism of institutional science joined with the enthusiastic emulation of its procedures and language. Those adhering to refused knowledge adopt a simplified understanding of the scientific method based on a para-scientific interpretation of practices typical of Western rationalism, such as deductive logic, empirical evidence and systematic scepticism. Hence, in some respects the turn to refused knowledge can be interpreted as the structuring of a moral career, as science’s institutional context actively participates in the process of structuring adhesion to the knowledge it refuses.