Tag Archive for 'science studies'

What is truth?

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Activism, Climate change, Disasters, Ethics, Language, Media, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 105 Comments

The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ’science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ’skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Continue reading ‘What is truth?’

The cultural politics and sociology of anti-science in Tony Abbott’s Australia

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Activism, Climate change, Federal Elections, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 163 Comments

Overland editor Jeff Sparrow has a great piece in Crikey today, reflecting on the significance of Christopher Monckton’s tour of Australia. If you’re not signed up, I’d strongly urge you to take out a trial subscription to read the whole thing.

Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars. Continue reading ‘The cultural politics and sociology of anti-science in Tony Abbott’s Australia’

The climate crisis, politics and our years of magical thinking

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Culture, Politics, Science and Sociology
. 36 Comments

I’ve had a stab, in a guest post over at Overland, at looking at how the tendencies we’ve always had to succumbing to magical thinking make climate change a very difficult challenge for politics – particularly when we need to ground that politics culturally as well as rationally in a postmodern age where the narrative is all.

The post is partly informed by the insights of the French sociologist Bruno Latour on knowledge and, particularly, by his claim that ‘we have never been modern’. If he’s right, and I think he is, there is no public sphere of reason to which we can unproblematically appeal. Rather, we need to ground our arguments in a sensibility which bridges the culture/nature divide, and to recognise that the only possible response to climate crisis is political. That’s a challenge both for progressives, who seem in many instances to have forgotten cultural politics, and for those who believe that reason will triumph. That’s also a belief – and it’s one that will only come true if it’s fought for.

You can read the post here.

Climate change denialism and the future of the right

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Climate change, Environment, Ethics, International, Markets, Science, Sociology and USA
. 66 Comments

With George W. Bush having a little over a week in office left to go of what has been a very long eight years, it’s timely to turn to the question of the long term implications for the political strength of the right of stances which refuse to engage with reality. In that context, John Quiggin has an interesting post on science and the right. I don’t agree with all he says about the “science wars”, but I think he’s spot on both with his lapidary analysis of the affinities between climate change denialism and right wing politics and in this observation:

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.

Bérubé on Sokal

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Media, Philosophy, Science and Sociology
. 22 Comments

One of the ironies of the Windschuttle kerfuffle is that Alan Sokal has a new book out. Perhaps all those Sokal analogies will help his sales. At any rate, blogger and UPenn cultural studies prof Michael Bérubé has some very interesting things to say in a review of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture in the American Scientist. Go read!