Abstract
Social scientists have offered a number of explanations for why Americans commonly deny that human-caused climate change is real. In this paper, I argue that these explanations neglect an important group of climate change deniers: those who say they are on the side of science while also rejecting what they know most climate scientists accept. I then develop a “nature of science” hypothesis that does account for this group of deniers. According to this hypothesis, people have serious misconceptions about what scientific inquiry ought to look like. Their misconceptions interact with partisan biases to produce denial of human-caused climate change. After I develop this hypothesis, I propose ways of confirming that it is true. Then I consider its implications for efforts to combat climate change denial and for other cases of public rejection of science.
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Notes
I follow the literature in using the term “climate change denial,” but my focus throughout the paper is on people who deny the reality of human-caused climate change, not any climate change whatsoever.
For a more detailed discussion of this trend, and an explanation of why it does not indicate conservative distrust of science, see this (2014) exchange between Dan Kahan and Gordon Gauchat: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/11/25/conservatives-lose-faith-in-science-over-last-40-years-where.html.
Or, in a second version of the instrument (Kahan 2016), “According to climate scientists…”.
This does not rule out the possibility that increasing knowledge can promote acceptance. In their provocative study, Ranney and Clark (2016) provide evidence that although understanding of the mechanism of global warming is very low throughout the population, interventions that teach people about the greenhouse effect can increase acceptance of human-caused climate change. But these results, while exciting, still do not explain what produces and maintains climate change denial in the first place.
Though psychologists have studied the relationship between understanding the nature of science and accepting evolution (e.g. Lombrozo et al. 2008), at present there is only one preliminary study on the relationship between understanding the nature of science and accepting human-caused climate change (Carter and Wiles 2014).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Justin Bernstein, Mikkel Gerken, Edouard Machery, Michael Weisberg, and 3 anonymous referees for their comments on drafts of this paper, as well as to audiences at the University of Pittsburg, Virginia Tech, and the University of Toronto who gave me excellent comments on earlier presentations of this work.
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Kovaka, K. Climate change denial and beliefs about science. Synthese 198, 2355–2374 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02210-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02210-z