Agnotology

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The study of culturally induced ignorance or misleading beliefs about scientific facts and theories
2. Analyzing how misinformation or obscured knowledge affects public understanding of science and policy
3. Investigating the strategic creation of doubt and ignorance in relation to scientific discourse and public opinion

Etymology: Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford, needed a name for the study of ignorance as something people actively produce, and in 1992 he asked the Irish linguist Iain Boal to devise one. Boal's answer was a neoclassical compound built on the Greek "ágnosis," meaning "not knowing," with the familiar "-logía," the suffix for a field of study. The result was a deliberately constructed term, not a word that grew organically from ordinary speech. The choice of base is what gives the coinage its point. Proctor wanted to highlight "the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing," the idea that ignorance has a history and is manufactured rather than simply absent. Greek "ágnōtos," meaning "unknown," sits in the same family, and the pairing signals a field studying the unknown in the way other "-logies" study their subjects. Proctor later edited a collection titled "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance," which brought the term into wider circulation.