agnotology

What does agnotology mean?

Agnotology can refer to the deliberative cultivation of ignorance (as by misinformation and disinformation) or to the study of this cultivation itself.

Examples of agnotology

Agnotology is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, often created by the strategic spread of misinformation.
—Janet Marugg (letter to the editor), The Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune, 24 May 2026

Agnotology is the deliberate creation of ignorance and doubt. The cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and spent billions of dollars obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking.
—Maribeth Newman (letter to the editor), The Des Moines Register, 7 July 2022

… agnotology provides a powerful framework for identifying the intentional motivations of actors’ attempts to subvert laws, procedures, public scrutiny, or political oversight.
—William Wannyn, Science, Technology, & Human Values, May 2026

At the Bristol library, [Mathelinda Nabugodi] realizes how ledgers reinforce human hierarchies. “The same record keeping techniques that help us sort and arrange books in a library also enable the reduction of human lives into nameless entries,” she writes, “and paved the way for transforming humans into commodities.” These ledgers were more than neutral bookkeeping. “The ledger is a powerful technology of dehumanization,” and a form of agnotology — a term for the deliberate production and maintenance of ignorance.
—Kerri Arsenault, The Boston Globe, 27 July 2025

Where does agnotology come from?

The linguist Iain Boal coined the term agnotology in 1992 based on a challenge by Robert N. Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University.

Some time into this project I learned that there already was a word that has been used to designate the study of ignorance. … Apart from being obscure and somewhat inharmonious, agnoiology has often been taken to mean “the doctrine of things of which we are necessarily ignorant” in some profound metaphysical sense. My hope for devising a new term was to suggest the opposite, namely, the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known—and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things. In 1992, I posed this challenge to linguist Iain Boal, and it was he who came up with the term agnotology, in the spring of that year. … Iain crafted agnotology … using gno as the root (meaning “to know”), a as the negating prefix, a t added as the marker of the participial (yielding gnot), and -ology as the denominative suffix.
—Robert N. Proctor, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” 2008

How is agnotology used?

Related forms include the adjective agnotological and the noun agnotologist, the latter of which can be used both for someone who studies ignorance and someone who deliberately cultivates it.

… Frank Johnson, an anthropologist who previously worked for the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, described an agnotological method by city officials to demolish Techwood via federal and/or state preservation law.
—Sean Seiler and Thomas Baker III, Fordham Urban Law Journal, 1 Mar. 2025

… the time when agnotologists were very successful in depicting climate findings as too speculative to take seriously.
—Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, 29 Mar. 2025

Believing that global climate change is a myth is one example of the kind of ignorance agnotologists investigate.
—Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, PBS, 18 Mar. 2011