Agnotology

Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data (disinformation).

[6] Agents of culturally induced ignorance include the media, corporations, and government agencies, through secrecy and suppression of information, document destruction, and selective memory.

For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was censored and delayed for at least a decade because some evidence remained classified military information related to undersea warfare.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that      "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

The term "agnotology" first appeared in print in a footnote in Stanford University professor Proctor's 1995 book, The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer:Historians and philosophers of science have tended to treat ignorance as an ever-expanding vacuum into which knowledge is sucked – or even, as Johannes Kepler once put it, as the mother who must die for science to be born.

He connected the topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal.

[18] He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 The New York Times story on medical historians who testify as expert witnesses.

As a more accurate term Stone suggested "ainigmology", from the Greek root ainigma (as in 'enigma'), referring to riddles or to language that obscures the true meaning of a story.

[34] Irvin C. Schick distinguishes unknowledge from ignorance, using the example of "terra incognita" in early maps in which mapmakers marked unexplored territories with that or similar labels, which provided "potential objects of Western political and economic attention.

Having called conclusions about human-caused climate change "alarmist" [ 1 ] contrary to the scientific consensus on climate change , Republican Senator Jim Inhofe displayed a snowball—in winter—as evidence the globe was not warming [ 2 ] —in a year that was found to be Earth's warmest to date. [ 3 ] The director of NASA 's Goddard Institute for Space Studies distinguished local weather in a single location in a single week from global climate change. [ 4 ]