What is agnotology and how is ignorance cultivated?

Agnotology is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, often created to sell products or influence opinions through misleading information. Within the sociology of knowledge, it examines how powerful interests, corporations, and media actively suppress facts or how structural information bubbles passively limit access to knowledge. The field also investigates why certain types of knowledge are ignored, delayed, or fail to emerge entirely.

What we know

• Agnotology is the study of deliberate, culturally cultivated ignorance or doubt typically used to sell products, influence opinion, or win favour through misleading data. [1, 2]
• Active agents of cultivated ignorance include corporations, mass media, and government agencies operating through secrecy, document destruction, and information suppression. [2]
• Passive causes of ignorance involve structural information bubbles, such as racial or class divisions that limit selective access to information. [2]
• Examples of delayed knowledge include plate tectonics data being censored for at least a decade because it was classified military information. [2]

Still open

• Evidence conflicts on how television affects viewers in relation to consuming repetitive or fact-free entertainment and confirmation bias.

Where to go next

• a case in pointHow does the tobacco industry playbook manufacture doubt?
• the bigger pictureWhat is epistemology in philosophy?
• how it workedHow do information bubbles restrict our access to facts?
• compared withWhat are the primary branches of science?
• an unexpected connectionHow do words with the suffix ology originate?

Sources

• [1]agnotology (Wikidata Q395027) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Agnotology · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]List of words with the suffix -ology · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Index of branches of science · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Epistemology · CC BY-SA 4.0