Denying Anthropogenic Climate Change: Or, How Our Rejection of Objective Reality Gave Intellectual Legitimacy to Fake News

Abstract

The political rise of right‐wing populism in the United States, and elsewhere, has prompted a reexamination of theoretical perspectives that oscillate on an unequivocal rejection of objective reality. Indeed, populist campaigns that have acquired wide currency in the last few years have been ontologically predicated on the idea that there exists different “truths.” The premise of different truths has debunked any notion of an objective reality by rendering even the most reified of “facts” to be the outcome of individual subjectivities and ideological subscriptions. Donald Trump’s appeal to “fake news,” for instance, captures the implications that emerge when certain material “facts” become delegitimated in the public arena. The obfuscation of material facts through its entanglements in political discourse raises a timely question concerning theoretical resistance: How can objective reality retain its conceptual and analytical ideations without succumbing to the dangers that objective science historically created for socially marginalized subjects? Contextualizing the denial of anthropogenic climate change as an illustrative case, I answer this question by developing theoretical insights from critical realism and the notion of feminist objectivity. These insights accept the socially constructed nature of an objective reality but refute the idea of value‐free knowledge—that is, it disavows the claim that all representations of knowledge are equally valid and equally valuable.

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“…10 See alsoLazer et al (2018) andScheufele and Krause (2019). 11 See, for example,Einstein and Glick (2015),Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler (2017),Hochschild and Einstein (2014),Jolley and Douglas (2014),Miller, Saunders, and Farhart (2016),Oliver and Wood (2014),Pasek et al (2015),Prasad (2019),Southwell, Thorson, and Sheble (2018),Thorson (2016),and Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson (2016).Fake News Is Real…”

The organization of ideological discourse in times of unexpected crisis: Explaining how COVID-19 is exploited by populist leaders

“…The organization of ideological discourse is part of the intricate machinery invoked by populists to craft social realities that are aligned to their own political and ideological aspirations. Citizens have the responsibility to decipher between truth and false, real and imagined, and fact and fiction (Prasad, 2019). As the effects of COVID-19 unfolds, it is crucial for citizens to be wary of the discourses about the disease coming from political leaders.…”

Call for SubmissionsBusiness Ethics QuarterlySpecial Issue on: Socio-Technological Conditions of Organized Immaturity in the Twenty-First Century

“…• Denial of scientific findings that challenge the foundations of enlightened, democratic societies, e.g., increasing beliefs in conspiracy theories and "alternative facts," including the denial of scientific findings on anthropogenic climate change or epidemic diseases (Grasso, 2019;Gunderson et al, 2018;Jarvis, 2019;Prasad, 2019);…”