For example, the findings from climate science form a highly
coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of
evidence: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human economic activities are
causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically
reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow
and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable.
People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because
the implications of cutting GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased
taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative
view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking.
Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the
Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions (or any other body
of well-established scientific knowledge) oppose whatever inconvenient finding
they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and
without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the
relevant scientific theory and findings.
Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with
claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence
does not matter because warming is good for us.”
Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can
only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be
wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position
against climate change mitigation.
This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory
subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and
conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific
propositions.
Read the Synthese paper
by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, and Elisabeth Lloyd - “The ‘Alice inWonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”
No comments:
Post a Comment