Fun for Friday: Agnotology?
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
This week’s post is a little less etymology and more about a concept I just learned about called agnotology, which is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt. The second part of the word is of course the same Greek root that gives us other “-logy” words, and the “agnoto-” is from Neoclassical Greek for “not knowing.” That portion is similar to “agnostic,” or the idea of not being certain whether there is a god or gods.
It’s a terrifying concept, too, that people would deliberately cause ignorance or doubt, but we have certainly seen it in recent years (and even before recent years). There is a somewhat opposite field of “epistemology,” which studies knowledge, but I don’t know that there’s really an equivalent “-logy” studying intentional fighting of ignorance and doubt. But perhaps that’s the concept you could take from this post and use as a story seed–the people out there fighting ignorance and doubt, and what they call the study of their work!
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