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Climate Skepticism and the Manufacture of Doubt: Can Dissent in Science be
Epistemically Detrimental?
Justin B. Biddle
Philosophy Program, School of Public Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology
Anna Leuschner
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Institut für Philosophie
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating
between epistemically beneficial and epistemically detrimental dissent. By “dissent,” we
refer to both the act of objecting to a particular position, especially positions that are
widely held, and the act of promoting the production and/or dissemination of such
objections. While dissent in science can clearly be beneficial, there might be some
instances of dissent that not only fail to contribute to scientific progress, but actually
impede it. Potential examples of this include the tobacco industry’s funding of studies
that questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer, and the attempt by the
petroleum industry and other groups to cast doubt upon the conclusion that human
consumption of fossil fuels contributes to global climate change. The problem of
distinguishing between good and bad dissent is important because of the growing
tendency of some stakeholders to attempt to delay political action by ‘manufacturing
doubt.’ Our discussion in this paper focuses on climatology. This field, in our view, is rife
with instances of bad dissent. On the basis of our discussion of climatology, we
articulate some sufficient conditions for epistemically-problematic dissent in general.
One of the consequences of our account is that the problem of distinguishing between
good and bad dissent has an ineliminable ethical dimension.
Acknowledgments
Each author is responsible for the paper in its entirety, and both authors contributed
equally to the final product. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at Bielefeld
University, Tilburg University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the GAP.8
conference at the University of Konstanz. We would particularly like to thank Paul Baer,
Gregor Betz, Sebastian Cacean, Martin Carrier, Matt Cox, Michael Hoffmann, Paul
Hoyningen-Huene, Philip Kitcher, Frederike Neuber, Bryan Norton, Naomi Oreskes,
Juha Saatsi, Christian Voigt, John Walsh, Torsten Wilholt, and Eric Winsberg for their
valuable comments.
1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating
between good and bad dissent in science. By ‘dissent,’ we refer to both the act of
objecting to a particular position, especially a position that is widely held, and the act of
promoting the production and/or dissemination of such objections. We use the terms
‘good’ and ‘bad’ primarily in an epistemic sense, such that good dissent is dissent that
contributes to knowledge production, and bad dissent is dissent that impedes knowledge
production. Though the primary focus of this paper is epistemic, we will end up arguing
that the problem of distinguishing between good and bad dissent has an ineliminable
ethical dimension.
Virtually all philosophers of science regard dissent as beneficial. Some, such as
Popper, regard it as unequivocally beneficial. On his view, the sole epistemological task
of the scientist is to attempt to falsify hypotheses; not only does consensus play no
positive epistemological role, but it is viewed with suspicion, like a political ideology that
is forbidden to be questioned. Most other, less extreme, theories of science recognize a
positive role for consensus, but all of these regard dissent as epistemically beneficial.
Without critical exchange, the process of examining, reworking, refining, and improving
scientific hypotheses would be difficult, if not impossible.
While there is no question that dissent in science can be (and typically is)
beneficial, we believe that there are some instances of dissent that not only fail to
contribute to scientific progress, but actually impede it. These cases are becoming
increasingly common in policy-relevant research, such as research on climate change
and on the health effects of smoking. The problem of distinguishing between good and
bad dissent is important because of the growing tendency of some stakeholders to
attempt to delay political action by ‘manufacturing doubt.’ Potential examples of this
include the tobacco industry’s funding of studies that questioned the link between
smoking and lung cancer, and the attempt by the petroleum industry and other groups to
cast doubt upon the conclusion that human consumption of fossil fuels contributes to
global climate change (e.g., Oreskes and Conway 2010; Kitcher 2011; Proctor and
Schiebinger 2008). Manufacturing doubt not only tends to delay political action that could
benefit society; it can also slow scientific progress – for example, by forcing scientists to
respond to a seemingly endless wave of unnecessary and unhelpful objections, and in
some cases, by creating a climate in which scientists fear the consequences of
defending positions as forcefully as they believe is appropriate.
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Our discussion in this paper will focus on climatology. This field, in our view, is
rife with instances of bad dissent – in particular, instances of dissent that attempt to stall
efforts to regulate greenhouse gases by eroding the consensus over anthropogenic
climate change. One potential example of this is the American Enterprise Institute’s
(AEI) offer of $10,000 (USD) to any scientist who provides results that contradict the
fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
(AEI 2007; Sample 2007; Mann 2012, 67). Intuitively, many people think that there is
something wrong with this offer, that it is an attempt to ‘buy’ particular research
outcomes that serve particular political and economic goals. We agree that there is
something wrong with the offer, though it turns out that explicating precisely what is
wrong with it is more difficult than it might at first appear.
The primary aim of this paper is to spell out some general, sufficient conditions
for epistemically-problematic dissent. We do not attempt to specify necessary conditions
of bad dissent; this aim, if it is indeed achievable, is well beyond the scope of this paper.
We begin, in Section 2, by addressing the narrow issue of what is wrong with the AEI
offer. We discuss a couple of candidate reasons why one might think that the offer is
problematic and argue that they are inadequate. In Section 3, we discuss the current
state of climate research and some of the most widely-cited arguments of climatechange deniers. In Section 4, we draw upon this discussion of climate research in order
to lay out some sufficient conditions for bad dissent in general. This account, in addition
to being theoretically significant, also addresses the practical problem of identifying realworld cases of epistemically problematic dissent.
2. On What is Not Wrong with the AEI Offer
Scientists should ultimately be open to any findings that are well-supported by data, and
many argue that funding organizations should be willing to reward any research that
meets high epistemic standards, regardless of the outcome of the research. Some might
find the AEI offer to be problematic because it does not reward just any research that
meets high epistemic standards; rather, it rewards only research that obtains a specific
set of results. On this account, dissent is epistemically problematic when it comes from
individuals or groups that are not open to just any result, but rather are interested in
obtaining only a specific result. This view is open to serious objections.
As Kuhn, Lakatos, and many others argue, it is normal and even epistemically
beneficial for scientists to attempt to obtain specific results (Kuhn 1962; Lakatos 1970;
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Biddle 2009). In Kuhnian terms, paradigms provide scientists with fairly clear ideas of
how some experiments will turn out. Scientists working within a paradigm will
consequently attempt to achieve these particular results; moreover, if they should fail,
they will question their own investigations or aptitudes before they question the reigning
paradigm. The guidance provided by a paradigm is, according to Kuhn, epistemically
beneficial, as it helps to structure scientists’ investigations and outline what counts as
acceptable and unacceptable results. Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research
programmes is similar in this regard; it includes rules such as a negative heuristic
(research paths to avoid) and a positive heuristic (research paths to pursue), which help
to save scientists “from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies” (Lakatos 1970,
193). On both of these accounts, not only is there nothing necessarily problematic about
scientists attempting to obtain a specific class of results; it is often epistemically
beneficial to do so.
Is there a body of work in climate science that has achieved the status of
something like a paradigm or a research programme – i.e., something that helps to
guide and constrain the work of climate scientists?1 We would argue that there is.
Despite uncertainties in details, all subcommunities in climate research have agreed,
since about the 1960s, that the anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gases,
particularly CO2, leads to global warming; that there is climate sensitivity, i.e., the Earth's
climate warming if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled, of about
1.5°C-4.5°C, and that this will change ecosystems strongly and quickly: water cycles will
change, sea levels will rise, there will be more droughts and floods, and so on.
Accordingly, the significant role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in global climate
change is commonly acknowledged and climate researchers build their theories in a way
that takes this assumption into account: greenhouse gases are represented in the core
structure of all general circulation models (Lloyd 2010, 980–981). This is justified as
scientists have been using a broadly-established instrumental and methodological
corpus for more than half a century providing them with a robust body of data that
indicate the salient role of greenhouse gases in global warming; data that are confirmed
by paleoclimatological proxies as well as observations from a multiplicity of other
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In asking this question, we are not committing ourselves to the details of either Kuhn’s notion of
a paradigm or Lakatos’s notion of a research programme. All that we are committed to is that
mature sciences contain bodies of work (theoretical and/or experimental) that legitimately help to
structure and constrain the work of scientists, such that attempting to achieve a particular result
or set of results would, in some contexts, be epistemically unproblematic.
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sources, including ships, satellites, radiosondes, ground stations, and reanalyses
(Leuschner forthcoming; Lloyd 2010; 2012). There is near-unanimous consensus on
these basics, as indicated by the IPCC, established in 1988 by the United Nations (UN)
to represent the international state of knowledge about the issues of climate change.
The IPCC assessment reports demonstrate that this broad consensus – over issues
such as the state of research, adequate research methods, open questions, and
remaining uncertainties – has been highly epistemically beneficial. It allows thousands of
scientists from all around the world to cooperate, compare results, evaluate and criticize
one another’s work, and advance their research projects.
Given the positive epistemic role that an agreed-upon body of work can have in
structuring and constraining the work of scientists, it is not the case that it is necessarily
problematic to attempt to achieve a specific set of results. Thus, the problem with the
AEI offer is not that it rewards only a specific class of results. As we will argue later, one
of the problems lies partly in which specific set of results it rewards.
Another potential reason for thinking that there is something epistemically
problematic with the AEI offer is that it appears to be motivated by a political and
economic agenda. Clearly, there are powerful industries that have an economic stake in
stalling political action to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, and there are influential
think tanks (such as the AEI) that promote an anti-regulatory agenda. One might argue
that dissent is epistemically problematic when it is put forward by groups that have an
economic stake – or some other significant non-epistemic stake – in the result.
Some philosophers of science would object to this by arguing that the motivation
for doing research has no epistemic bearing whatsoever; defenders of the
Reichenbachian distinction between the context of discovery and the context of
justification could argue that all epistemically-relevant issues fall within the context of
justification, and that the motives for doing research fall squarely within the context of
discovery. At best, this response succeeds if there exists a value-neutral scientific
method that can unambiguously decide between competing hypotheses. Recently,
however, philosophers of science have shown that not only is there no value-neutral
method, but that “non-epistemic” value judgments are made in all areas of research, and
that these value judgments cannot be eliminated. As a result, it is not possible to draw a
clear-cut distinction between a value-laden context of discovery and a context of
justification that contains only epistemic values (Biddle 2013; Douglas 2000; 2009; Elliott
2011; Longino 1990; 2002; Wilholt 2009). Thus, there is no such neutral scientific
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method. (This issue will be discussed in more detail in Section 4.) Moreover, as Okruhlik
(1994) has argued, even if there were such a method, social factors would still influence
the content of science (the context of justification), if they influence the generation of
theories (the context of discovery) and if theory choice is a comparative affair. Thus,
whether or not one maintains a Reichenbachian distinction between the context of
discovery and the context of justification, it cannot be the case that dissent is
problematic merely because it is motivated by non-epistemic considerations.
Moreover, as Kitcher has argued, there are many situations in which ‘impure’
motivations – such as the desire for credit, fame, and financial reward – can be put to
good epistemic use (Kitcher 1993, ch. 8). More specifically, there are situations when
communities of ‘epistemically sullied agents’ (which he defines as agents who strive to
achieve both a non-epistemic goal such as credit and an epistemic goal such as truth)
perform better at an epistemic task than communities of ‘epistemically pure’ agents. The
reason for this is that impure motivations, such as the desire to obtain the credit that
results from achieving a particular result first, can help to distribute the labor of scientists
over a multiplicity of different research strategies, which is beneficial for the community
as a whole. It would be a mistake, however, to use this argument to defend the work of
most climate skeptics. As Kitcher makes clear, epistemically ‘grubby’ motives can only
promote scientific progress when they are combined with the motive to seek epistemic
goals such as truth or reliability. Absent the goal of truth or reliability, there is little to
prevent methodological standards from being skewed to achieve desired results. It
changes the situation altogether when we have agents who are not merely epistemically
sullied, but epistemically depraved. In these agents, non-epistemic motives do not just
operate, they predominate and can even lead to the situation that scientists seek to
avoid the truth in order to serve specific non-epistemic interests (Mann 2012, 61).
Thus far, we have provided two candidate accounts of the distinction between
good and bad dissent, both of which fail. In the next two sections, we will attempt to
provide an account that succeeds.
3. Dissent, Climate Science, and Climate Skeptics
Research by climate skeptics purports to show either that there is no anthropogenic
global climate change – i.e., that climate change, if it is happening at all, is exclusively
due to natural causes – or that the anthropogenic factors are negligible as compared to
natural causes. Both claims contradict the long established scientific consensus that
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during the past 100 years the human production of greenhouse gases has caused
exactly that warming which, being a deviation from those climate variations observed
during the last several hundred thousand years, is considered as particularly dangerous
to existing ecosystems (Jaeger and Jaeger 2011; Nordhaus 1975). The famous two
degree-target which has been adopted in international climate policy is based on this
insight: as we do not know if exceeding this range of climate variations on Earth allows
existing ecosystems to adapt, we should under all circumstances try to limit the warming
under this critical value. Climate models indicate that strong mitigation measures must
be imposed on greenhouse gas emissions to hit the two degree-target. Although it is
unknown if such measures will prevent major damages, it is almost certain that failing to
reduce emissions will cause severe environmental, social, and economic problems.
In contrast, climate skeptics deny that human activity contributes to global
climate change; more specifically, many argue that it is solar activity that causes global
warming. It is true that solar activity is one cause of recent global climate change. Solar
activity is measured by sunspots that have been recorded since 1825 (fig. 1); as can be
seen on the NASA homepage, monthly averages of sunspot numbers “show that the
number of sunspots visible on the sun waxes and wanes with an approximate 11-year
cycle” (NASA 2012).
Fig.1 (Source: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg)
The number of sunspots is an indication of solar activity, and the stronger the solar
activity, the higher the average mean surface temperature on Earth. Thus, there is a
consensus in climate research that solar activity influences the global climate.
Many climate skeptics go further, however, and argue that recent climate change
is caused exclusively by solar activity; since the early 1980s this has been one of the
main “scientific” arguments against anthropogenic climate change (Elsasser and Dunlap
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2013, 765–766; Boykoff 2013, 807). For example, in a publication in Science from 1991,
the Danish meteorologists Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen pointed to an alleged
correspondence of the sunspot number and temperature data (fig. 2). If their claim were
true one might indeed argue that the greenhouse effect would be negligible as a causal
factor of past global warming.
Fig. 2: Alleged correspondence of solar activity and global warming
(Friis-Christensen and Lassen 1991, 700)
However, since the 1970s the recorded temperature data have not corresponded
to the sunspot cycle. Physicist Peter Laut and modeler Jesper Gundermann asked
Science on behalf of the Danish Energy Agency for the empirical sources and tried to
reconstruct the result of Friis-Christensen and Lassen. They quickly came to the
conclusion that there must be something wrong with it. As they demonstrated, FriisChristensen and Lassen had generated the correspondence of the curves by two
technical tricks. First, Friis-Christensen and Lassen had “put two different temperature
series together […] without performing the necessary zero point correction, even though
the two series are defined by different reference points. In this way the right hand part of
the temperature curve is lowered in such a way that about one third of the observed
global warming disappears on their figure” (Laut and Gundermann 2000, 190). Second,
they used a filter on the sunspot data (line with crosses) from 1850 to 1970 to fit the data
in a way that pointed up the parallel development of the sunspot cycle and temperature
development. However, they used unfiltered, oscillating single data points from 1970 on;
only that way did they obtain a solar activity curve that exceeded the actual maximum of
1940 and, therefore, showed a parallel development with the temperature curve until
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1985. This would have been the case neither by using only raw data nor by fitting all
data the same way (Laut and Gundermann 2000). It would seem that Friis-Christensen
and Lassen were so eager to find their hypothesis confirmed by the available data that
they chanced this manipulation to get the evidence they wanted.
After the manipulation had been debunked and publicized, Lassen revised the
outcome in 2000 in a co-authored publication with Peter Thejll. Under consistent filtering
of all data, the observed temperature curve (TObs) deviates from the curve of the solar
cycle length (TSCL) after 1970 (fig. 3).
Fig. 3: Revision by Thejll and Lassen (2000, 1210)
Since then, the deviation of the global mean temperature from the solar cycle has
constantly risen; while solar activity can explain two-thirds of global warming before
1988, it explains only 30 percent of the observed global warming today (Thejll and
Lassen 2000, 1213). This does not mean that the sun does not influence the global
climate but that there must be another predominant causal factor of the global warming
since 1970 (at the latest). According to the climate models’ output, the best explanation
of global warming is based on a combination of all known causes, natural forcings due to
solar activity and volcanoes as well as anthropogenic forcings (IPCC 2007, 40).
One might argue that, to this point, the theory of solar activity and its effects on
global mean temperature is an example of normal scientific progress: it was flawed in
the beginning, then criticized, and then revised accordingly. But oddly enough, there are
still scientists who adhere to the flawed version of the theory in a slightly modified
version by admitting that though it might be true that solar variation does not directly
influence global climate there must be an indirect influence of solar activity. According to
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Friis-Christensen (who still propagates the flawed results from 19912), his colleague
Henrik Svensmark, and a small group of other scientists, it is cosmic rays that influence
the building of lower clouds that reflect sunlight and thereby have a cooling influence on
the climate. This characteristic of cosmic rays again depends on solar activity: the
stronger the solar activity, the fewer the cosmic rays that reach the Earth. This
hypothesis of cosmic rays being responsible for climate change through cloud building
was scrutinized and rejected by Sloan and Wolfendale (2008), and the CLOUD
experiment at CERN, which examined the hypothesis, revealed that “even with the large
enhancements in rate due to ammonia and ions [caused by galactic cosmic rays],
atmospheric concentrations of ammonia and sulphuric acid are insufficient to account for
observed boundary-layer nucleation” (Kirkby et al. 2011, 429). The quantity of particles
does not suffice to be a key factor of the building of low-level cloud cover. What in
addition to this contradicts the theory by Svensmark and his colleagues is that there is
no trend of cosmic rays observable that could explain the temperature increase of the
last decades – just as there is no such trend in solar variation (Rahmstorf et al. 2004).
Therefore, the rise in global mean temperature since 1970 can’t be explained completely
through the sun, either in a direct or an indirect way. Even more, as Mike Lockwood and
Claus Fröhlich argued, “over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have
had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that
required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.” (Lockwood and
Fröhlich 2007, 2447) What allows for claiming that solar activity or cosmic rays have
caused the warming is only “inadequate statistics and non-robust procedures”
(Lockwood 2012, 503). Despite this criticism from the community, the Danish scientists
insist on their theory (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen 2007). This is particularly
problematic as their statements have been frequently used by climate skeptics as
scientific support for their climate skepticism.
Oreskes and Conway reveal how the sunspot theory has been misused,
especially by the George C. Marshall Institute that compiled a complete report of the
theory which William Nierenberg presented to members of the Office of Cabinet Affairs,
the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Policy Department, and the Office of
2
In the movie The Cloud Mystery from 2008, Friis-Christensen stated: “When we published this in
1991, it was at a time when everybody believed that the warming that had taken place during the
century was mainly due to carbon dioxide increase, man-made greenhouse gases. So, when this
community saw this perfect, nearly perfect correlation between solar magnetic activity changes
and temperature, they were very surprised.”
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Management and Budget (Oreskes and Conway 2010, 186). Despite the official revision
of the theory, which was confirmed not least in the first IPCC assessment report, the
Marshall Institute insisted on ignoring the state of research. Nowadays, it still stresses
there has always been climatic warming and cooling on Earth so that the results of
climate impact research are untenable, that there is no scientific consensus about what
role anthropogenic factors play (if any) as causing factors in global warming compared to
natural causes, and that the climate models that are represented in the IPCC reports are
unreliable and deliberately constructed in a way that confirms the scientists’
expectations. The Marshall Institute has been spreading these misguided statements
ever since, via the Internet, non-peer-reviewed publications, and sponsored talks by
scientists. “These and related arguments deflect the conversation away from examining
scientific evidence regarding global warming and instead discuss the causes of current
warming. Making such arguments also delegitimizes the notion that carbon reduction
measures could in fact help prevent increased global warming.” (Elsasser and Dunlap
2013, 766)
Thus far, we have discussed two serious problems with prominent research of
climate skeptics. It makes use of inadequate statistics by cherry-picking and
inconsistently fitting data (temperature, SCL, and cosmic ray data), and many skeptics
continually refrain from discarding their theories by making ad hoc adjustments to
surrounding hypotheses (e.g., from direct to indirect solar influence), while at the same
time declaring the established explanation of anthropogenic climate change irrelevant or
wrong. Yet, showing that there are problems with the research of climate skeptics does
not establish that their dissent is problematic. To see why this is, consider J. S. Mill’s
argument against censorship. One of the main reasons why Mill opposed censorship is
that dissenting opinions can lead to a better appreciation of consensus positions, even
when the consensus position is true and the dissenting opinions are false and even
completely misguided. Objecting to a true claim with a bad argument can, in some
cases, lead to a better understanding of the true claim by providing a more complete
justification of that claim. We have witnessed this many times in the history of science.
For example, most of the Catholic Church’s arguments against Galileo’s hypothesis that
the moon is not a perfect sphere were bad arguments; despite this, these arguments led
to a more complete justification of the hypothesis. Thus, bad science does not
necessarily make for bad dissent. What is it that, in addition to being bad science, makes
some of the research by climate skeptics instances of bad dissent?
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At least in some cases, climate skeptics not only produce bad arguments, but are
simply uninterested in producing good ones. (Otherwise, it is difficult to explain tactics
such as the ad hoc filtering of data in order to obtain a particular result.) That is, in some
cases, they are not motivated to produce true or reliable research, but rather are
interested solely in furthering a particular political and/or economic agenda. Given this,
one might maintain the following: when scientists (a) dissent from a position, and (b) are
not motivated to achieve an epistemic aim such as truth or reliability but are rather
motivated solely or predominantly by a political, economic, or some other non-epistemic
goal – the dissent is problematic. We will call this the “depraved motivations account of
bad dissent.” This account, in our view, represents a better account than the ones
discussed in Section 2, though as we will discuss in the next section, it is not without its
problems. It is our belief that some of the research done by climate skeptics satisfies the
depraved motivations account, though we do not take ourselves to have presented an
exhaustive argument for this belief. In particular, we do not take ourselves to have
established conclusively that the research that we have criticized was undertaken by
scientists who were motivated solely by non-epistemic aims. We do, however, think that
we have presented a prima facie case for this view.
Why might dissent that is not motivated by epistemic aims be considered bad
dissent? Such dissent is unlikely to lead to results that are reliable or well confirmed,
because depraved motives tend to bias research. In particular, such motives tend to
influence the types of hypotheses considered, the methods employed for the evaluation
of results, the characterization or interpretation of data, and so on, in such a way as to
raise the probability of achieving a desired result.3 As mentioned earlier, sometimes bad
or even biased research can lead to epistemic progress by providing a better
understanding of confirmed positions. However, when dissent is motivated solely by
non-epistemic aims, this is unlikely to happen; in these situations, because their aims
are solely non-epistemic, the dissenters will not be likely to be swayed by
counterarguments that show their positions to be flawed.
3
Much of the research on the effects of financial conflicts of interest in science provides evidence
for this claim. For reviews of this literature, see Bekelman, Li, and Gross (2003) and Lundh et al.
(2012).
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4. Inductive Risk and the Evaluation of Dissent
While the depraved motivations account is plausible, there are several objections that
could be raised against it, and there are three in particular that are important to address.
First, while it might be true that some climate skeptics have depraved motivations, there
might also be many who do not. In other words, there might be many climate skeptics
who genuinely believe either that human activity is not contributing to global climate
change or that we have no good reason for believing that this is so. This objection is not,
strictly speaking, an objection to the depraved motivations account as a sufficient
condition for bad dissent, but it does suggest that the usefulness of the account might be
very limited. If we want an account of bad dissent that could potentially apply to these
epistemically-motivated scientists, then we need an account that is broader than the
depraved motivations account.
Second, if the only way in which to determine whether dissent is problematic is to
accurately identify the intentions of those putting forward the dissent, then it will be
difficult to determine, in any given case, whether dissent is problematic. Scientists are
motivated by all sorts of factors, and it is extremely difficult, in any given case, to argue
convincingly that a scientist or group of scientists is motivated solely or even
predominantly by non-epistemic aims. This objection does not assert that the depraved
motivations account is false (or even too narrow); as such, it does not purport to identify
a theoretical problem with the account. It does, however, identify a practical problem with
employing this account to pick out real-world cases of bad dissent.
Third, we have claimed (in Section 2) that research is inevitably laden with
values, even “non-epistemic” values. If this is so, then how can we criticize climate
skeptics for being motivated by non-epistemic considerations? The previous section
established that climate skeptics have made value-laden decisions that raise the
probability of achieving a particular result; but if research is inevitably value-laden, then
how can we single out the research and/or dissent of climate skeptics as being
particularly epistemically problematic?4
In this section, we will formulate a more general account of bad dissent, one that
4
There is a very quick way of answering this objection. We do not argue that it is epistemically
problematic if scientists (climate skeptics included) are motivated by non-epistemic interests;
rather, we argue that it is epistemically problematic if scientists are motivated solely or
predominantly by non-epistemic interests. Even if research is inevitably value-laden, it does not
follow that non-epistemic interests must predominate. We believe this to be a sufficient response
to the second objection; however, we provide an additional and fuller response in the remainder
of this section.
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avoids the second objection and that answers the first and third. This account will draw
upon the notion of inductive risk, which is the risk of wrongly accepting or rejecting a
hypothesis. A number of philosophers have drawn upon the notion of inductive risk in
order to argue that value judgments – even ethical value judgments – play an
ineliminable role in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses (Douglas 2000; Elliott 2011;
Wilholt 2009). The most well-known version is due to Richard Rudner, who argues that
the scientist qua scientist accepts or rejects hypotheses, and that no hypothesis can
ever be completely (with 100% certainty) verified. The decision to accept or reject a
hypothesis depends upon whether the evidence is sufficiently strong, and whether the
evidence is sufficiently strong is “a function of the importance, in a typically ethical
sense, of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis” (Rudner 1953, 2,
emphasis in original). Therefore, the scientist qua scientist makes (ethical) value
judgments. To illustrate this argument, Rudner writes:
If the hypothesis under consideration were to the effect that a toxic ingredient of
a drug was not present in lethal quantity, we would require a relatively high
degree of confirmation or confidence before accepting the hypothesis – for the
consequences of making a mistake here are exceedingly grave by our moral
standards. On the other hand, if say, our hypothesis stated that, on the basis of a
sample, a certain lot of machine stamped belt buckles was not defective, the
degree of confidence we should require would be relatively not so high. How sure
we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend upon how serious a
mistake would be. (Rudner 1953, 2, emphasis in original)
While some have attempted to show that the argument from inductive risk is not
successful in establishing that values play an ineliminable role in the epistemic
evaluation of hypotheses, these objections fail.5 Thus, for the remainder of this paper,
we will assume that the argument from inductive risk successfully establishes that values
ineliminably influence the epistemic evaluation of hypotheses.
If the argument from inductive risk is successful, we must answer the question of
whether we can ever distinguish between cases of acceptable value-influence and cases
of illegitimate bias. To do this, consider the example of research on the health effects of
bisphenol A, as discussed by Wilholt (2009). While many studies have drawn an
5
The two most well-known sets of objections are those of Jeffrey (1956) and Levi (1960; 1961;
1962). For responses to Jeffrey (1956), see Biddle and Winsberg (2010) and Biddle (2013). For
responses to Levi, see Wilholt (2009).
13
association between bisphenol A and adverse health effects, most industry-funded
studies have found no such correlation. In fact, 90% of government-funded studies
investigating the effects of low-dose exposure to bisphenol A found a correlation, while
none of the industry-funded studies found a correlation (vom Saal and Hughes 2005;
Wilholt 2009). Further investigation into some of these industry-funded studies shows
that they used as model organisms a strand of rat that was particularly insensitive to
estrogen. Given that the toxicity of bisphenol A is associated with its similarity to human
estrogen, this choice of a model organism significantly lowered the probability of finding
an association with adverse health effects.
This choice of model organism can also be viewed through the lense of the
argument from inductive risk, as it lowered the risk of obtaining false positives at the
expense of a significantly higher risk of false negatives. (In terminology that we will
employ below, it minimized producer risk at the expense of public risk.) Could one draw
upon Rudner’s argument in order to show that these industry-funded studies were
merely value-laden, in the same way in which all research is value-laden? After all, in
every experiment, we must make decisions that involve a trade-off between risk of false
positives and false negatives; industry might do this one way, other stakeholders
another, but because the decisions are value-based, one might argue that we cannot
accuse one of bias and the other not. Wilholt (2009) argues that, despite the fact that all
hypothesis-appraisal is inevitably value-laden, we can still show that the industry studies
on bisphenol A are biased by appealing to conventional standards. There are many
decisions in science that are not dictated by either logic or evidence, but that require
judgment calls on the part of individuals. The determination of what counts as a
statistically-significant result is one such decision, but there are many others. Moreover,
if every scientist made these judgment calls on his or her own and did not make it clear
to other scientists which judgment calls they have made and how these might affect the
outcomes of research, then it would be difficult to trust the results put forward by other
scientists. The solution to this problem is the adoption of community-wide conventional
standards. If scientists can be confident that conventional decisions are made in a
uniform way, then their ability to trust the results of other scientists is increased.
The notion of established conventional standards can help to explain why the
research on bisphenol A is biased in a way in which merely value-laden research is not.
The use of a strain of rat that is particularly insensitive to estrogen violates a
conventional standard in toxicology. A group of experts convened by the U.S. National
14
Toxicology Program has made explicit the following convention: “Because of clear
species and strain differences in sensitivity, animal model selection should be based on
responsiveness to endocrine active agents of concern (i.e., responsive to positive
controls), not on convenience and familiarity” (quoted in Wilholt 2009, 97). Choosing
species and strains in this way is perfectly reasonable – it might, in fact, seem
completely obvious – but it is a matter of convention. The industry studies on bisphenol
A did not just choose a strain that would raise the probability of obtaining a desired
result; in so doing, they also violated a well-entrenched conventional standard. It is this
violation that sets the research apart as being biased, rather than just value-laden.
Given this discussion of inductive risk and conventional standards, we are now in
a position to formulate a broad set of sufficient conditions for bad dissent in general.
Recall, again, that by ‘dissent,’ we refer to both the act of objecting to a particular
position, especially a position that is widely held, as well as the act of promoting the
production and/or dissemination of such objections. We will at first simply state our
account of bad dissent, after which we will provide rationale and discussion.
Dissent from a hypothesis H is epistemically problematic if one of the following obtains:
i.
One objects to H; the consequences of wrongly rejecting H are severe;
the dissenting research that constitutes the objection violates established
conventional standards, and the dissenting research involves intolerance for
producer risks at the expense of public risks.
ii.
One promotes the dissemination of an objection to H; the consequences
of wrongly rejecting H are severe; the dissenting research that constitutes the
objection violates established conventional standards, and the dissenting
research involves intolerance for producer risks at the expense of public
risks.
The terminology of ‘producer risks’ and ‘public risks’ is a variant on that of ‘producer’ and
‘consumer’ risks (Churchman 1947; Shrader-Frechette 1988). Producer risks are risks of
wrongly accepting hypotheses, and consumer risks are risks of wrongly rejecting
hypotheses. The phrases ‘producer’ and ‘consumer risks’ are typically used in the
context of technology assessment and policy-relevant science. We use the phrase
‘public risks’ instead of ‘consumer risks,’ because there are consequences that fall
primarily on the public, even if the public cannot be said to be consumers of the
technology or science in question. For example, the consequences of wrongly rejecting
the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change fall primarily on the public, even though
15
the public is not a consumer of this hypothesis in any strict sense of the word.
We will refer to this account as the ‘inductive risk account of bad dissent.’ This
account, in our view, has a number of attractive features, including helping us to answer
the objections raised at the beginning of this section. Before we explain why this is the
case, however, it is important to discuss why we introduce an inductive risk account in
the first place, and what the connection is between this account and the inhibition of
knowledge production.6 To do this, consider dissent from a very different hypothesis –
namely, the Einsteinian hypothesis that simultaneity is relative. Suppose furthermore
that this dissent involves a violation of established conventional standards. Should we
consider this to be bad dissent, in the sense at issue in this paper? That is, should we
consider this to be dissent that impedes knowledge production? We do not believe so.
We should consider the dissent to be an instance of bad science, but not bad dissent,
and we should not consider it to be bad dissent because it will have virtually no impact
on scientific knowledge at all. Scientists who continue to defend the relativity of
simultaneity in the face of this dissent will encounter a very different atmosphere than
that of current climate science. They will not be forced to respond over and over again to
the same bad arguments. They will not be dragged before houses of congress or
parliament and asked to justify their positions. They will not have their emails hacked
and taken out of context, and they will not find themselves at the center of a controversy
called “simultaneity-gate.” The main reason why none of these unfortunate
circumstances will befall the defenders of the relativity of simultaneity is that the
consequences of wrongly rejecting (or accepting) this hypothesis are mild, especially in
comparison to hypotheses like anthropogenic climate change; in particular, there are no
significant consequences for powerful political and/or economic interests that might have
a stake in the research.
The two types of risk in this account – producer risk and public risk – tend to fall
on different parties. The consequences of wrongly accepting the hypothesis that
bisphenol A has deleterious health effects fall primarily on the industries that produce
this chemical; the consequences of wrongly rejecting the hypothesis fall primarily on the
public, especially those exposed to the chemical. The consequences of wrongly
accepting the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change fall primarily upon industries
that produce greenhouse gases; the consequences of wrongly rejecting the hypothesis
fall primarily on the public. The implications of the inductive risk account for the inhibition
6
We are grateful to Torsten Wilholt for discussion on this point.
16
of knowledge production become apparent when one takes into account the fact that
industrial interests (sometimes with aligned political interests) are exerting increasing
influence over all aspects of scientific research, including the choice of research
problems, the choice of methodologies, the interpretation of data, and decisions
concerning the publication and/or dissemination of research.7 One of the specific ways in
which industrial interests are affecting research is the distribution of inductive risks;
research is increasingly organized so as to minimize producer risks at the expense of
public risks (Douglas 2000; 2009; Elliott 2011; Wilholt 2009). When research is
organized in this way, some hypotheses will be met with more skepticism than others.
Research that has implications that are contrary to powerful industries such as the
pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry, and the oil and gas industries is
subjected to intense levels of scrutiny; in some cases, scientists who have conducted
this research have suffered both personally and professionally as a result of attacks from
industry (and from the universities and government bodies that are heavily influenced by
industry) (e.g., Krimsky 2003; Mann 2012; Waltz 2009). This, in turn, can have
significant implications for the development of knowledge. Those scientists who go
against the grain and perform ‘public interest science’ face greater obstacles than those
who perform industry-friendly research; their research receives greater scrutiny, they are
more likely to face personal and professional attacks, and in many cases, their research
is less likely to receive funding. On the other hand, scientists who perform industryfriendly research work within a system that is geared toward having their results
accepted and disseminated widely (e.g., Oreskes and Conway 2010; Sismondo 2007;
2009). This is a crucial part of the explanation of why research from climate skeptics,
including research that violates established conventional standards, has as much
influence as it does.
The upshot of this is that, given the way in which research is increasingly
organized, research that minimizes producer risks at the expense of public risks is likely
to influence scientific debate to a much greater extent than it should (i.e., than is
warranted by the quality of the research in question). Conversely, research that is more
7
There is now a large literature on how recent changes in the organization of research affect the
development and/or dissemination of scientific knowledge. See, for example, Bekelman, Li, and
Gross (2003), Biddle (2007; 2012; forthcoming), Brown (2008), Elliott (2011), Krimsky (2003),
Lundh et al. (2012), Mirowski and van Horn (2005), Sismondo (2007; 2008), and Vom Saal and
Hughes (2005).
17
tolerant of producer risks is likely to influence scientific debate much less than it should.8
Because of this asymmetry, research that both violates established conventional
standards and is intolerant of producer risks at the expense of public risks is likely to
inhibit the development of scientific knowledge, in a way in which research that is more
tolerant of producer risks does not.
The inductive risk account of bad dissent avoids the three objections to the
depraved motivations account, which were discussed at the beginning of this section.
The first objection, again, is that some climate skeptics have genuinely epistemic
motivations, and the second is that if the only way to determine whether dissent is
problematic is to identify accurately the intentions of the dissenters, then it will be difficult
to determine, in any given case, whether dissent is problematic. The inductive risk
account avoids both of these objections by specifying sufficient conditions for
problematic dissent that do not make reference to the intentions of individuals or groups.
This account answers the third objection by drawing upon conventional standards,
which, as discussed above, help to distinguish between bad dissent and good dissent
that is value-laden.
Does this account work as a positive characterization of bad dissent? One might
think that it fails, because it does not provide sufficient conditions for determining when
promoting the production of dissenting research is problematic. As such, it does not
provide a general explanation of what is wrong with the AEI offer. We do not, however,
believe that this represents a problem with our account, because there is very little that
one can say at a general level about the merits of promoting the production of dissenting
research. One might argue that the AEI offer is problematic on the basis of the intentions
of the AEI or individuals within the AEI, but this is not the primary problem with the offer.
The reason why the AEI offer is problematic is because it is likely to result in research
that suffers from the epistemic deficiencies discussed in the previous section and
because it exacerbates the asymmetry. Two problems that were identified with much
research by climate skeptics, again, are the violation of conventional standards in their
use of statistics and the continual refusal to discard inadequate theories by making ad
hoc adjustments to surrounding hypotheses. Climate skeptics perform research in a
system that is systematically structured to tolerate public risks at the expense of
producer risks; in this way, they have a history of doing biased research. Given the goals
8
This is similar to Kitcher’s notion of ‘epistemic asymmetry’ in his discussion of constraints on
free inquiry (2001, Chapter 8).
18
of the AEI, in conjunction with this history of biased research, it is reasonable to expect
that research that is produced as a result of this offer will be biased as well. The
fundamental problem with the offer, in other words, is not the intentions of those making
the offer, but rather the reasonable expectation that it will result in certain kinds of
behavior.9
This account also explains the problems with the sunspot theory, as defended by
Friis-Christensen and Lassen. The sunspot theory represents an objection to HACC; the
consequences of wrongly rejecting HACC are severe; Friis-Christensen and Lassen
violated established conventional standards in their defense of their objection, and they
displayed an intolerance of producer risks at the expense of public risks. One of the
main problems with this version of the sunspot theory, again, is that Friis-Christensen
and Lassen treated different subsets of data differently. They used filtered sunspot data
from 1850 to 1970 and unfiltered sunspot data from 1970 on; without dividing the data in
this way, the solar activity curve would not have fit with the temperature anomaly curve.
Moreover, dividing the data in this way clearly violates the conventional standard of
applying a consistent set of standards to one’s entire data set.
This account of epistemically problematic dissent has a number of important
implications; two in particular are deserving of discussion. First, while we are primarily
interested in providing an account of epistemically problematic dissent, the account that
we have given implies that, at least in many cases, there is an ineliminable ethical
dimension to bad dissent. On our account, judgments of inductive risk play an important
role in picking out cases of bad dissent. Given that inductive risk judgments have an
ethical component, then so, in these cases, does the badness of the dissent. This is not
a particularly surprising result. If one argues, as we do, that the epistemic appraisal of
hypotheses in science is ineliminably value laden, then one cannot expect that an
account of the difference between good and bad dissent would be value-free.
Second, because the determination of whether dissent is problematic depends
upon the consequences of wrongly accepting or rejecting hypotheses, and because the
consequences of wrongly accepting or rejecting hypotheses depend, in many cases,
upon characteristics of the society in which the dissent is put forward (and, in particular,
upon how society influences the organization of scientific research), the determination of
whether dissent is problematic will be contextual and society-dependent. One of the
reasons why some research by climate skeptics counts as epistemically problematic
9
We are grateful to John Walsh for discussion on this point.
19
dissent is because that research is accepted uncritically, and in many cases promoted
effectively, by interested parties in positions of power. This, in turn, influences not only
the beliefs of the general public; it also makes it more difficult for responsible climate
researchers to perform their research. Michael Mann, the lead author of a paper on
temperature trends that included the “hockey-stick graph,” is a case in point. On the
basis of attacks against him by climate skeptics, he has been subjected to politicallymotivated investigations by the U.S. Congress, he was a target of an investigation by the
conservative Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, and he has even been the
object of death threats. While these attacks do not appear to have inhibited Mann from
continuing with his research, they create an atmosphere that can be damaging to
scientific inquiry. Epistemically problematic dissent is dissent that inhibits knowledge
production, and whether dissent inhibits knowledge production depends not simply on
characteristics of scientists, but also of society.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have addressed the neglected but important problem of differentiating
between good and bad dissent in science. In particular, we have attempted to provide
some sufficient conditions for epistemically problematic dissent in general. We have
argued that dissent from a hypothesis H is epistemically problematic if one of the
following obtain:
i.
One objects to H; the consequences of wrongly rejecting H are severe; the
dissenting research that constitutes the objection violates established
conventional standards, and the dissenting research involves intolerance for
producer risks at the expense of public risks.
ii.
One promotes the dissemination of an objection to H; the consequences of
wrongly rejecting H are severe; the dissenting research that constitutes the
objection violates established conventional standards, and the dissenting
research involves intolerance for producer risks at the expense of public risks.
Given the reliance of this account on inductive risk, and given that there is an
ineliminably ethical component to inductive risk judgments, our account of bad dissent
has an ineliminable ethical component, and it implies that whether dissent is
epistemically problematic can depend not just upon characteristics of the scientific
community, but of society at large.
20
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