This note provides an overview of the research framework of the Agnotology Lab. For details on each topic, see the individual notes.
Why Study "Ignorance"?
We are surrounded daily by vast quantities of information, yet remain ignorant of matters of decisive importance. This is no accident. The discipline that Robert Proctor (2008) named "agnotology" (無知学) investigates how ignorance is intentionally produced and maintained. The tobacco industry's decades-long, systematic concealment of evidence regarding health harms was the starting point of this field.
Tsuruta Souto and Tsukahara Togo, eds. (2025), in Invitation to Agnotology (『無知学への招待』), classified ignorance into three layers:
- Native Ignorance — What is not yet known. The frontier of science.
- Lost Knowledge — What was once known but has been forgotten.
- Strategically Produced Ignorance — The intentional maintenance of a state of "not knowing."
This lab focuses primarily on the third layer — strategically produced ignorance. Advertising, propaganda, media, educational systems, legal frameworks, and technology are often discussed in isolation. Yet from the vantage point of agnotology, they share the same structural patterns as "apparatuses for the production of ignorance."
Grounded Theory Coding Framework
Research Approach: Inductive Dataset Construction
Why Single-Axis Classification Systems Fail
The phenomena addressed by agnotology are inherently multidimensional. A single case may simultaneously constitute advertising and propaganda, be jointly executed by state and corporate actors, and be reproduced through the education system — such layered complexity is the essence of ignorance production.
This lab initially designed a classification system based on six research domains (advertising, propaganda, media, education, religion/authority, national character/group psychology). However, this approach suffered from structural problems.
- Inconsistent axes: D1–D5 were organized along an actor axis (who produces ignorance), while D6 (national character/group psychology) constituted a cultural-contextual axis — the classification criteria were not uniform.
- Overlap: Advertising (D1) and propaganda (D2) merge in reality as government communications and political advertising, making mutually exclusive categorization difficult.
- Gaps: Important mechanisms of ignorance production — restriction of knowledge through legal systems (secrecy laws, patent regimes), architectural control through technology (algorithmic filtering), and knowledge disparities arising from economic structures — fell outside the system.
Single-axis MECE classification is, in principle, unsuited to multidimensional phenomena such as those studied by agnotology.
Grounded Theory-Style Structured Coding
As a new approach, this lab adopts inductive dataset construction following grounded theory methodology. Rather than sorting cases into predefined domains, we assign multidimensional tags to individual research notes and allow classification taxonomies to emerge from accumulated data.
Each research note's frontmatter is tagged along the following seven coding axes:
| # | Axis | Definition | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | mechanisms | How ignorance is produced (mechanism) | Free tag |
| 2 | actors | Organizational level: individual / organization / institution / social-field / technical-system | Constrained tag |
| 3 | actorDetails | Specific actor names | Free tag |
| 4 | targets | What kind of knowledge is suppressed | Free tag |
| 5 | intentionality | strategic (intentional) / structural / emergent | Constrained tag |
| 6 | powerDirection | top-down / lateral / bottom-up / algorithmic | Constrained tag |
| 7 | geoCultural | Geographic and cultural context | Free tag |
"Constrained tags" are selected from predefined options, while "free tags" may be created anew as cases demand. Free tags grow in vocabulary as research notes accumulate, eventually forming bottom-up classification systems through clustering and co-occurrence analysis.
This approach offers three advantages:
- Preservation of multidimensionality: Multiple mechanisms, actors, and targets can be assigned simultaneously to a single case. For the tobacco industry case, one can write
mechanisms: [doubt-manufacturing, regulatory-capture],actors: [organization, institution],actorDetails: [tobacco-industry, regulatory-agency], thereby describing the complexity of the phenomenon as it is. - Structural prevention of gaps: When a new case cannot be described by existing axes, this signals the need to expand an axis or add a new one. In fixed domain classifications, cases that do not fit the framework are simply ignored.
- Facilitation of discovery: Co-occurrence patterns among tags reveal structural similarities that researchers did not anticipate in advance. The "useful ignorance" identified by McGoey (2012; 2019) — the structure in which not knowing serves a function for those in power — is a paradigmatic example of patterns that emerge from precisely this kind of inductive analysis.
Cross-Cutting Themes
Tags along the mechanisms axis form cross-cutting themes as structural patterns that transcend individual cases.
| Cross-Cutting Theme | Related Mechanisms | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Asymmetry | doubt-manufacturing, attention-control | The cost of producing falsehood < the cost of correcting it. The asymmetry described by Brandolini's Law is a structural feature common to advertising, propaganda, and media, and has been amplified by orders of magnitude through AI-generated content. |
| Epistemic Injustice | epistemic-exclusion | The power structure governing whose voice is recognized as "knowledge." The pattern in which NPOs' field knowledge is dismissed as "subjective" is a typical instance of this mechanism (→ Details: Epistemic Injustice in NPOs and Information Access Disparities). |
| Strategic Ignorance | strategic-ignorance | Institutional mechanisms for intentionally keeping inconvenient knowledge at bay. The pattern whereby evidence is dismissed as "insufficient data" in EBPM is typical (→ Details: The Obstructive Effects of Strategic Ignorance in EBPM). |
| Filter Structures | attention-control, complexity-weaponization | The invisibilization of the "unseen" through selective presentation of the "seen." The same structure repeats at different scales, from algorithmic filtering to the selective content of educational curricula. |
| Conformity and Silence | silence-structuring | The structuring of "knowing but not speaking" by raising the cost of dissent. The "rule by atmosphere" (空気) analyzed by Yamamoto Shichihei represents the Japanese manifestation of this mechanism. |
What We Should Do / What We Need Not Do
What We Should Do
- Accumulate and structure research notes based on the seven-axis coding framework
- Build a corpus of essays that reexamine current affairs through the structural lens of agnotology
- Construct bottom-up taxonomies through co-occurrence analysis and clustering of tags
- Develop an original system of agnotology rooted in Japan's sociocultural context
- Design information literacy education as counter-design
What We Need Not Do
- Develop fact-checking methods per se (existing organizations are already working on this)
- Collect and verify individual fake news cases (this belongs to the domain of journalism)
- Attack specific religions, political parties, or organizations (this is structural analysis, not denunciation)
- Assert that "ignorance is bad" as a moral claim (the purpose is to illuminate structures)
- Design a complete, deductive classification system in advance (we build inductively from data)
References
Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance
Proctor, R. N. & Schiebinger, L.. Stanford University Press
Read source
無知学への招待 — 未知・無知・不可知の人文学
鶴田想人・塚原東吾 編. 明石書店
Read source
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
Fricker, M.. Oxford University Press
Read source
The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model
Paul, C. & Matthews, M.. RAND Corporation, Perspectives PE-198
Read source
Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance
McGoey, L.. Economy and Society, 41(1), 1-16
Read source
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
McGoey, L.. Zed Books
Read source
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Bergstrom, C. T. & West, J. D.. Random House
Read source
「空気」の研究
山本七平. 文藝春秋
Post-Truth
McIntyre, L.. MIT Press
Read source