Dogmatology

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The branch of knowledge that investigates the nature of doctrines and beliefs involves both their analysis and critique within various contexts
2. The academic field focused on examining and interpreting established doctrines and belief systems
3. A discipline dedicated to the exploration and critical assessment of principles and creeds

Etymology: Dogmatology is a learned coinage, built from the Greek "dogma," meaning an opinion or tenet, and the suffix "-logy," from "logos," meaning study or discourse. The Greek "dogma" originally meant something like "what seems good to one" or a decree, and it was used in Greek for an official ruling or established opinion. Theologians took it over for doctrines the church treated as settled. The compound itself is a later formation, built on the same pattern as "theology" and "ethnology," and the pattern is far older than the word. Its exact date of first use in English is uncertain to me, but it belongs to the nineteenth-century habit of coining scholarly disciplines by attaching "-logy" to a Greek root.