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One of the first questions Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University, poses about those who insist the Earth is flat is: “Can these people be serious?”
As one of the most extreme examples of science denial, McIntyre starts his book, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason , by describing his visit to the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, US. The answer to his question, he quickly concludes, is “yes, completely so”.
McIntyre provides a useful analysis of how to identify science denial. He describes five elements that are almost always part of the arguments: cherry-picking evidence; belief in conspiracies around the issue; reliance on fake experts; logical errors; and setting impossible levels of evidence for any opposing views.
Given this, McIntyre explains that combating science denial can be done by correcting the inaccuracies of the science, but also by pointing out the fallacies in the mode of thinking, known as technique rebuttal.
He also sets out carefully the argument for why we can and should engage with science deniers. A study in 2010 demonstrated a “backfire effect”, where presenting the evidence against a person’s position causes an even stronger adherence to it – leading to the demoralizing idea that there may be no point in fighting back. But McIntyre reports that these results were never replicated. In fact, a breakthrough experiment done in 2019 by behavioural scientists Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch from the University of Erfurt, Germany, showed that several methods of rebuttal were more effective than no response at all.
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