Why do we remain ignorant — and is it by accident or by design? Through the lens of agnotology, we dissect the mechanisms by which advertising, propaganda, media, education, religion, and authority produce and maintain ignorance, reexamining social issues and current affairs from an academic perspective.
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Research methodology and approaches adopted in this lab.
Critical Literature Review Systematically reviewing prior work in agnotology, epistemology, media studies and education, then extracting and classifying the mechanisms by which ignorance is deliberately produced, along several coding axes.
Tools & Methods: Zotero / Zenodo / J-STAGE / Google Scholar
Conceptual Analysis Philosophically analysing the conceptual boundaries between ignorance, non-knowledge and the unknowable, and clarifying qualitative differences in ignorance across cases.
Tools & Methods: Concept mapping / Comparative analysis framework
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01 The New Ignorance Produced by Algorithms — Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers 2026-03-13
→ 02 Japan's Structural Reproduction of Climate Skepticism (How Doubt Circulates) 2026-07-02
→ 03 Why Are the Voices of Persons with Disabilities Not Heard? — The Japanese Structure of Testimonial Injustice 2026-03-13
→ 04 The Statistical Absence of Femicide (The Structure of Deaths That Cannot Be Counted) 2026-07-02
→ 05 'Kūki' and Sontaku — The Japanese Form of Pluralistic Ignorance 2026-03-14
→ 06 Why Unreported Issues Are Treated as 'Nonexistent' — Media Agenda-Setting and Invisibilization in Japan 2026-03-15
→ 07 The Monthly Labour Statistics Scandal and the Reproduction of State Ignorance — When the Numbers 'Did Not Exist' 2026-07-02
→ 08 Okinawa and Structural Ignorance — The Politics of Mainland Japan's 'Not Knowing' 2026-03-16
→ 09 Poverty and Epistemic Exclusion — The Structure of 'Being Unable Even to Know' 2026-03-17
→ 10 Why Predatory Business Endures — Structural Analysis of Converting Information Asymmetry into Profit 2026-03-18
→ 11 The Doubt Manufacturing Industry — The Sixty-Year War of Tobacco and Climate 2026-03-19
→ 12 The Reproduction of Authority and Ignorance — The Structure of 'No Need to Know' 2026-03-20
→ 13 AI Amplification of the Brandolini Asymmetry — When the Cost of Producing Lies Approaches Zero 2026-03-12
→ 14 Information Literacy as Counter-Design: Curriculum Principles Centered on Epistemic Justice 2026-07-05
→ 15 Counter-Design Practices in Japan — A Structural Analysis of Domestic Attempts to Implement Epistemic Justice 2026-07-06
→ 16 Selective Description in Educational Curricula and the Filtering of Knowledge 2026-07-02
→ 17 Epistemic Injustice and Information Access Gaps in NPOs — Visualizing Structures Where Voices Go Unheard 2026-03-12
→ 18 Motivated Ignorance — The Cognitive Structure of 'Not Wanting to Know' 2026-03-21
→ 19 "I Have No Recollection" — The Institutionalization Mechanism of Political Memory Denial 2026-07-02
→ 20 The Archaeology of Silence — Five Methods for Excavating What Was Never Debated 2026-07-08
→ 21 The Inhibitory Effect of Strategic Ignorance in EBPM — How 'Pretending Not to Know' Distorts Policy 2026-03-12
→ 22 The Production Mechanism of Taboos — Who Decides What 'Must Not Be Said' 2026-03-22
→ 23 Research Framework of the Agnotology Lab — An Inductive Coding Framework 2026-03-12
→ 24 Literature Map of Agnotology in the Japanese-speaking World 2022–2026 — Tracing the Birth of a Discipline 2026-03-23
→ 25 A Methodology for International Comparison of Counter-Design — A Framework for Comparing Four Lineages that Implement Epistemic Justice 2026-07-07
→ 26 Cross-Axis Analysis of 22 Notes / Structural Patterns in Ignorance Production 2026-07-09
→ 27 From 'Merchants of Doubt' to 'Captors of Regulation' — Reading Big AI's Regulatory Capture through 27 Mechanisms 2026-05-20
→ Key terms and definitions used in this research.
Agnotology The study of how ignorance is deliberately produced and maintained. Proposed by R. N. Proctor in 2008.Related terms: Strategic Ignorance / Epistemic Injustice
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Epistemic Injustice A wrong in which a speaker's testimony is unfairly discounted because of their social attributes (gender, race, occupation and so on). Systematised by M. Fricker in 2007.Related terms: Agnotology / Testimonial Injustice
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Strategic Ignorance Policymakers or companies deliberately obstructing the production and circulation of inconvenient knowledge. Theorised by L. McGoey.Related terms: Agnotology / EBPM
Brandolini's Law The rule of thumb that refuting misinformation takes an order of magnitude more energy than producing it. Also called the bullshit asymmetry principle.Related terms: Post-Truth / Firehose of Falsehood
Post-Truth A condition in which emotion and personal belief carry more weight in shaping public opinion than objective fact. Oxford Dictionaries made it word of the year in 2016.Related terms: Brandolini's Law / Agnotology
Firehose of Falsehood A propaganda technique that releases large volumes of falsehood at high speed across many channels, saturating the audience's capacity to verify. Named by the RAND Corporation in 2016.Related terms: Brandolini's Law / Propaganda
Testimonial Injustice One form of epistemic injustice: testimony that is not judged on its merits because of prejudice against the group the speaker belongs to.Related terms: Epistemic Injustice / Hermeneutical Injustice
Hermeneutical Injustice One form of epistemic injustice: socially marginalised groups being unfairly deprived of the conceptual resources to understand and articulate their own experience.Related terms: Epistemic Injustice / Testimonial Injustice
Merchants of Doubt Strategic actors who deliberately manufacture doubt against scientific consensus in order to delay policy decisions. Named by Oreskes & Conway (2010).Related terms: Strategic Ignorance / Agnotology
White Ignorance The epistemological ignorance that a white-supremacist society structurally maintains: a social contract to treat the historical consequences of colonial rule and slavery as unknown. Formulated by C. W. Mills (1997).Related terms: Epistemic Injustice / Agnotology
Sociology of Non-Knowledge A branch of sociology that analyses ignorance as socially constituted. Developed by U. Beck, M. Gross and P. Wehling. Complements agnotology.Related terms: Agnotology / Strategic Ignorance
Pluralistic Ignorance Individuals privately holding doubts, wrongly assuming that others hold none, and therefore staying silent. The cognitive basis of the Japanese kuuki (the mood in the room) and of conformity pressure.Related terms: Post-Truth
Sleeper Effect The psychological phenomenon whereby information from a low-credibility source is remembered detached from that source over time, so its persuasive force rises after the fact. The cognitive basis of the firehose strategy.Related terms: Firehose of Falsehood / Brandolini's Law
Sontaku The Japanese practice of acting on a presumed intention from above without any explicit instruction. Structurally similar to Proctor's ignorance as passive construction: not asking is what produces the ignorance.Related terms: Pluralistic Ignorance
Regulatory Capture A phenomenon in which industry effectively dominates the regulator, so that rules meant to serve the public interest work for industry instead. Theorised economically by Stigler (1971).Related terms: Strategic Ignorance / Agnotology
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Ethics Washing Self-regulation that puts on the appearance of ethics and is used in place of accountability that actually bites. In the AI industry, framings such as responsible AI and human-centred AI serve this purpose.Related terms: Regulatory Capture / Strategic Ignorance
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Government Complicity The bidirectional side of regulatory capture, completed when the regulators themselves — not the regulated — actively adopt the industry's narrative. Named by Birhane et al. (2026).Related terms: Regulatory Capture
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Design Science Research (DSR) A problem-solving research methodology that accumulates knowledge by designing and evaluating artifacts such as frameworks, taxonomies and models. Formalised by Hevner (2007).Related terms: Agnotology
Source↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
31 entries
Open bibliography → Detailed reference list for this research.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 正欲 (Seiyoku)↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
朝井リョウ (2021)
A society that flies the banner of diversity certifies only certain desires as legitimate, and does not even imagine those who fall outside. A literary rendering of epistemic exclusion
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. Big AI's Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)
Birhane, A., Angius, R., Agnew, W., Pandit, H. J., Mitra, B., Dobbe, R., & Talat, Z. (2026)
An empirical study classifying regulatory capture in the AI industry into five categories and 27 mechanisms, analysing 249 cases across 100 articles. Uses the Design Science Research methodology. To be presented at FAccT'26 (25-28 June 2026, Montreal). The main reference for this lab's note synthesis-big-ai-regulatory-capture
31. Society memberships, paper submissions, and presentation plans.
2026-06 Publication · In Progress
Working Paper ISVD-WP-2026-001: An Inductive Research Framework for Agnotology Zenodo — Zenodo DOI取得 → 引用可能な学術文献化。synthesis-big-ai-regulatory-capture (2026-05-20) を Chapter 4 として組み込み予定
2026-11 Paper Submission · Planned
Poster presentation at the JSSTS Annual Meeting JSSTS — “Mechanisms That Produce Structural Ignorance — An Inductive Case Analysis”
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