for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity

• the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
  • we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
• and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
  • an illusion produced by
    • collisions of particles or
    • brain chemistry or
    • something that we can never in principle experience
• what we're doing is
  • applying concepts derived from our experience
  • to an imagined realm that
    • we think is beyond experience
• but it's not
• This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior

adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.

• for: climate denial, climate denier, climate change denialism, climate change denial, climate change denier
• title
  • Why focusing on “climate change denial” is counterproductive
• authors
  • Christian Bretter
  • Felix Schulz
• source
  • https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217716120

• date

  • March 1, 2023

• claim

  • We believe that the dichotomous view of
    • climate change “deniers” and
    • climate change “accepters”
  • is not helpful.
  • This way of framing the debate only stymies our path to a zero-carbon future. It does so for three primary reasons:
    • First, it creates an inaccurate picture by overstating the share and importance of climate change deniers for tackling climate change.
    • Second, a focus on climate denialism divides and polarizes society, further preventing constructive engagement with different opinions.
    • Third, it distracts us from concentrating on the more pressing question: how we should tackle climate change, not if.

• comment

  • I disagree with some of the claims, especially when there is a spectrum of disbelief that has significant impacts on dealing with climate crisis effectively.
    • for example, there is a lot of climate change denialism in the Republican party which is holding up adequate funding for dealing effectively with the climate crisis.

!- good observation on psychology of confronting loss : climate change - when confronted with the loss of liberty (give me liberty or give me death), we tighten our grip<br /> - our climate denialism increases in proportion to the perceived degree of loss of liberty

!- for : climate change, rapid whole system change * This is a common response of people conditioned to the status quo personware - it is overwhelming and threatening * Defensiveness and conservatism to preserve the familiar elements of the status quo is a common response, including all forms of climate denialism * Early stages of pandemic in which people were afraid to don masks for fear of being ostracized