Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?
Black is white and white is black
HIV does not cause AIDS. The world was created in 4004 BCE. Smoking does not cause cancer. And if limate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions. Few, if any, of the readers of this journal will believe any of these statements. Yet each can be found easily in the mass media.
Denialism is a process that employs some or all of five characteristic elements in a concerted way. The first is the identification of conspiracies…
…There is also a variant of conspiracy theory, inversionism, in which some of one’s own characteristics and motivations are attributed to others…
…The second is the use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge…
The use of fake experts is often complemented by denigration of established experts and researchers, with accusations and innuendo that seek to discredit their work and cast doubt on their motivations…
…The third characteristic is selectivity, drawing on isolated papers that challenge the dominant consensus or highlighting the flaws in the weakest papers among those that support it as a means of discrediting the entire field…
The fourth is the creation of impossible expectations of what research can deliver…
…The fifth is the use of misrepresentation and logical fallacies…
..Logical fallacies include the use of red herrings, or deliberate attempts to change the argument and straw men, where the opposing argument is misrepresented to make it easier to refute…
…The normal academic response to an opposing argument is to engage with it, testing the strengths and
weaknesses of the differing views, in the expectations that the truth will emerge through a process of debate.
However, this requires that both parties obey certain ground rules, such as a willingness to look at the evidence as a whole, to reject deliberate distortions and to accept principles of logic. A meaningful discourse is impossible when one party rejects these rules…
…Instead, we argue, it is necessary to shift the debate from the subject under consideration, instead exposing to public scrutiny the tactics they employ and identifying them publicly for what they are. An understanding of the five tactics listed above provides a useful framework for doing so.
Pascal Diethelm, Martin McKee
OxyGene`ve, Geneva, Switzerland
London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
London, UK
European Journal of Public Health, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2–4
