The varieties of denialism
on OCTOBER 28, 2014
by Massimo Pigliucci
I have just come back from a stimulating conference at Clark University about “Manufacturing Denial,” which brought together scholars from wildly divergent disciplines — from genocide studies to political science to philosophy —
to explore the idea that “denialism” may be a sufficiently coherent phenomenon underlying the willful disregard of factual evidence by ideologically motivated groups or individuals.
Let me clarify at the outset that we are not talking just about cognitive biases here. This isn’t a question of the human tendency to pay more attention to evidence supporting one’s view while attempting to ignore contrary evidence. Nor are we talking about our ability as intelligent beings to rationalize the discrepancy between what we want to believe and what the world is like. All of those and more affect pretty much all human beings, and can be accounted for and at the least partially dealt with in the course of normal discussions about whatever it is we disagree about.
Rather, the Oxford defines a denialist as “a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence,” which represents a whole different level of cognitive bias or rationalization. Think of it as bias on steroids.
The conference began exploring the topic of denialism with a delightful keynote by Brendan Nyhan [1] who set the tone with a talk on “The Challenge of Denial: Why People Refuse to Accept Unwelcome Facts.” This was followed by three sessions of three talks each, on Modern Strategies and Rhetoric of Denial, Political Uses of Denial, and Countering Denial: How and When? Hopefully the video of the conference will be available soon, and since contributors were asked to submit a paper to go along with their contribution, hopefully we will soon see an collection in print. I was asked to be on the final panel of the conference, attempting to bring together the several threads I noticed during the main proceedings and offer some general reflections. So the rest of this essay will refer only in passing to my colleagues’ fascinating contributions, and expand instead on the general commentary I offered.
The first two things that became clear during our discussions of denialism are particularly disturbing to me as a scientist and philosopher. First, as a scientist: it’s just not about the facts, indeed — as Brendan showed data in hand during his presentation —
insisting on facts may have counterproductive effects, leading the denialist to double down on his belief.
This, of course, should not be taken to mean that the facts don’t matter. If I want to push the idea that climate change is real, or that evolution is a valid scientific theory, or that the Armenian genocide was indeed a genocide, I better get my facts as straight as possible. It’s a pure and simple question of intellectual integrity.
But if I think that simply explaining the facts to the other side is going to change their mind, then I’m in for a rude awakening.
That was a lesson I learned many years ago while debating creationists. A debate is a fun event, during which your testosterone is pumped into your veins, which can rally your troops (helping, say, with a fund raising), and which may even grab the attention of fence sitters and others who knew little about the subject matter. What it certainly won’t do is to convince your opponent or any of his committed supporters. Indeed, my best moments as a debater (against Institute for Creation Research’s Duane Gish, or Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Wells) came when I was able to show the audience that these people were consciously lying to them. Nobody likes to be treated as a fool, not even a creationist.
As a philosopher, I found to be somewhat more disturbing the idea that denialism isn’t even about critical thinking. Teaching about logical fallacies isn’t going to do any better than teaching about scientific facts.
Indeed, the evidence from the literature is overwhelming that denialists have learned to use the vocabulary of critical thinking against their opponents. To begin with, of course, they think of themselves as “skeptics,” thus attempting to appropriate a word with a venerable philosophical pedigree and which is supposed to indicate a cautiously rational approach to a given problem. As David Hume put it, a wise person (i.e., a proper skeptic) will proportion her beliefs to the evidence. But there is nothing of the Humean attitude in people who are “skeptical” of evolution, climate change, vaccines, and so forth.
Denialists have even begun to appropriate the technical language of informal logic: when told that a majority of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming up, they are all too happy to yell “argument from authority!” When they are told that they should distrust statements coming from the oil industry and from “think tanks” in their pockets they retort “genetic fallacy!” And so on. Never mind that informal fallacies are such only against certain background information, and that it is eminently sensible and rational to trust certain authorities (at the least provisionally), as well as to be suspicious of large organizations with deep pockets and an obvious degree of self-interest.
What then? What commonalities can we uncover across instances of denialism that may allow us to tackle the problem beyond facts and elementary logic?
Participants at the conference agreed that what the large variety of denialisms have in common is a very strong, overwhelming, ideological commitment that helps define the denialist identity in a core manner. This commitment can be religious, ethnical or political in nature, but in all cases it fundamentally shapes the personal identity of the people involved, thus generating a strong emotional attachment, as well as an equally strong emotional backlash against critics. Think of Jenny McCarthy’s “I don’t care about science, my son is my science” refrain, or of people who are convinced that leftist environmentalists are out to undermine the American style of life, or of the Turkish government who equates acknowledgement of the Ottoman atrocities against the Armenians as a permanent moral stain on the very idea of a Turkish state, or again of the religious fundamentalist who equates accepting Darwin’s theory with the rejection of the divine, the end of morality and the destruction of any meaning in life. That’s why facts and reason can only do so much (or little) to turn the denialist.