From issue 502 of Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter:

AGNOTOLOGY Over on another list, Joel Berson noted that this word appeared in an article about corporate responsibility in the New York Times last Tuesday. Agnotology is the study of culturally- induced ignorance. It was created by Robert Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University and first used in another article in the same newspaper in 2003. Ignorance, he says, is frequently not just the absence of knowledge but the result of cultural forces, such as media neglect or corporate or governmental secrecy, suppression and manipulation, as well as a result of our selective memories, inattention, and forgetfulness. The word is from Greek “agnosia”, ignorance. He need not have bothered to create it, since the Oxford English Dictionary has “agnoiology”, first recorded in 1856, for which its second definition is “that department of philosophy which inquires into the character and conditions of ignorance”