Autorenprofil
I’ve argued a few times with global warming skeptics, and in every case, they’ve asked me to explain the science. The implication is that if I don’t understand the science for myself, I just believe whatever I’m told. And I can’t explain the science. I mean, I can explain it superficially: our planet cools by emitting infrared radiation, carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation, so putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causes the planet to store more heat and gradually get warmer. But if you ask me for details—how do we know that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation, for example—I’m stumped.
So why do I think global warming is real? Because the climate scientists say so. And unless you are a climate scientist, the same is true of you.
So maybe climate skeptics, and not just climate skeptics, but vaccine skeptics, moon-landing skeptics, and so on, all have a point. We haven’t figured any of these issues out for ourselves. We think that climate change is real and vaccines are safe because other people said so. We haven’t, on these issues, thought for ourselves.
The ideal of the independent thinker has been central to our intellectual culture. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that “Have courage to use your own reason!” could be called the motto of enlightenment. To fail to use one’s own reason was giving in to cowardice and laziness. Rather than taking responsibility for one’s life, one was relying on the instructions of some authority.
Climate skeptics want to present themselves as the heirs to this Enlightenment ideal. Maybe they’re wrong. But maybe we should question the ideal itself. Some contemporary philosophers argue that it fails to appreciate how much we rely on the testimony of others. My belief that there is a war in Ukraine, for example, is based entirely on testimony. I haven’t gone there. Even if I did go, at most I would personally see a few battles. I would need to rely on others to establish that those battles were part of a larger pattern of violence. I can’t figure out whether there’s a war using my own reason, or at least not just my own reason. At some point, I have to rely on the reason—and trustworthiness—of others to have any real idea what’s going on.
This doesn’t just apply to geopolitical events, either. We all know that toothpaste works. We know you’re supposed to put it on your toothbrush. But why? I actually have no idea how it works. I’m guessing most readers don’t either. I use toothpaste because my parents told me to when I was a kid, and dentists have confirmed that I should. Listening to my dentist seems like a good idea. Refusing to use toothpaste until I understood the science for myself would be silly.
So maybe when it comes to the courage of thinking for oneself, discretion is the better part of valor. It might sound inspiring to talk about being an independent thinker who refuses to follow the consensus. I get to feel like Galileo while I use Google searches to teach myself physical chemistry. But realistically, the say-so of climate scientists is a better guide to global warming than anything I could figure out on my own. They’ve spent decades studying the issue. I haven’t. The real issue isn’t whether I can explain the science for myself. That’s like asking whether I have personally witnessed the war in Ukraine. The real question is whether we have reason to think that the people I’m listening to are trustworthy.
Another way to put this is, how do we figure out which experts really are experts, without becoming experts ourselves. After all, we don’t have time to become experts ourselves, not on every topic. But we can ask for evidence that the people who want our trust actually know more than we do—and more than the other, rival experts we could listen to instead. Given how dependent we are on testimony, evaluating this kind of evidence might be the central critical thinking skill: not relying on our own reason but figuring out whose reason to rely on, and when.
This doesn’t entirely answer climate skeptics, but it does suggest a more productive question: is it more reasonable to believe climate scientists are genuine experts, or are they exaggerating, perhaps inadvertently, about how well they understand global climate?
Coming up: MPE blogpost series, Part II: How should we identify experts?
Suggested further reading:
John Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence”
Michael Huemer, “Is Critical Thinking Epistemically Responsible?”
Neil Levy, “Do Your Own Research!”
Cailin O’Connor and Brian Weatherall, The Misinformation Age
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