Skip to main content

LCT Roundtable


Title: Constellations of Scepticism: Contesting Climate Science with Hyper-Knowledge Codes

Mathew Toll, PhD Candidate, LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building

Abstract: Report after report assessing climate science details a growing mountain of evidence that climate change is indeed happening and that it is human caused. Considering this: how do climate sceptics maintain their scepticism? What can the LCT concept of constellations reveal about their belief systems and inform strategies of engagement with climate sceptics? This roundtable will employ constellations analysis to three central climate sceptic blogs and propose an extreme form of knowledge code that impedes knowledge-building. The climate sceptic blogosphere is a key venue for the development and distribution of climate misinformation. Recent political events have underscored the importance of understanding how climate denial is cultivated and legitimated online. Malcom Robert’s maiden speech to the Australian Senate, for instance, acknowledged the contribution to the public debate made by climate sceptic bloggers. While in the U.S. the election of Donald Trump has seen a concern with a new ‘post-truth’ politics online and an embracing of climate denial. Rather than a rejection of truth or science, central climate sceptic blogs position themselves as ‘auditors’ of climate science and demand technical competence as the basis of legitimacy, while the presence of any social features that deviate from an idealized conception of scientists is condemned. They therefore construct a form of knowledge code that establishes idealized – and potentially unattainable – standards of legitimate knowledge and knowers which provide a basis to contest knowledge without providing alternative explanatory power. Climate sceptics construct a constellation in which climate scientists are alarmist who fail to meet the norms of science, while climate sceptics defend these displaced norms with a hyper-knowledge code.
Labels:

Comments

Smile quotes said…
Very amazing and interesting topic
September 15, 2017 at 2:52 AM
Mathew Toll said…
Here was the official uni ad for it: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/ssps/news_events/events/index.shtml?id=9884
July 30, 2018 at 1:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Japanese Economic Miracle: Creative Destruction and Administrative Guidance.

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to...
1 comment
Read more

Ideology and Symbolic power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu.

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics o...
7 comments
Read more

On the dead and buried: Marx, Structure and Agency.

In The Rebel , Albert Camus locates Karl Marx within a 19th century tradition which attempted to “substitute, everywhere, the relative for the absolute”. For Camus, Marxism represents a revision and re-articulation of Auguste Comte’s evolutionary theory of society. This assessment of Marx characterized his philosophical disposition as an inverted bourgeois positivism. However, Camus’s general interpretation is not without competitors from both Marxists and Non-Marxists alike. There are a myriad of works, which attempt to explain Marx’s social thought and establish his exact position on countless points of controversy. Historical Materialism or the materialist conception of history has been one such point of controversy, especially with regards to the relationship between human agency and social structures implicit within the theory. Within the Marxian tradition itself, two broad perspectives on the structure-agency debate emerged after the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 19...
2 comments
Read more