Climate Science Denial as Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance

ABSTRACT

Climate science denial results from ignorance and perpetuates ignorance about scientific facts and methods of inquiry. In this paper, I explore climate science denial as a type of active ignorance called willful hermeneutical ignorance, where ignorance is actively maintained by a gap in a person’s conceptual resources. This kind of ignorance is active in the sense that it resists correction. For instance, climate science denial may be motivated by ideological reasoning and other biases, it is often not responsive to the introduction of more evidence, and it can be maintained as consequence of conceptual gaps, or hermeneutical lacunas, that make possible a certain degree of blindness to evidence. I then identify three hermeneutical lacunas in the epistemology of science that prevent the uptake of evidence for anthropogenic climate change – one from Lawrence Torcello and two from the work of Dale Jamieson. Finally, while climate science denial’s resistance to correction poses significant challenges for effective education about climate science, this framework also suggests a way forward: education that emphasizes building basic concepts required for understanding and interpreting scientific research.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate science denial
• willful hermeneutical ignorance
• active ignorance
• science education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing for precision on this point.

2. For a standard account of conversational implicature, see Grice (1989).

3. Insofar as each of these examples concerns foundational concepts in the epistemology of science, it is also probable that they intersect in interesting ways. For instance, someone who does not understand how uncertainty is valuable in scientific inquiry may also have difficulty distinguishing between virtuous scientific skepticism and the insidious pseudoskepticism that Torcello describes. Lacunas can contribute to active ignorance by reinforcing other lacunas, in addition to giving rise to specific areas of ignorance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon E. Mason

Sharon E. Mason is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas. Her research focuses on perspectives in epistemology, especially in relation to first person awareness, virtue epistemology, and standpoint theory.