I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, sorry. Are you positing some kind of ur-blockhead who wouldn’t respond to my suggestions, or are you saying that it’s unfair of me to expect my (for want of a better word) adversary to do my arguing for me? Because that’s not really what I was getting at. I’m saying that if somebody says “there’s no proof for climate change,” you might ask in reply “is it that there’s no proof, or is it that you don’t know what the proof is?” Then they’ve either got to demonstrate some kind of understanding of the debate, or admit ignorance.
Since you mention the “burden of proof,” I think it’s worth mentioning that climate change is a very complex subject and the vast majority of us who accept climate change as a reality would not be able to prove the hypothesis. Certainly not in a conversational setting. We read and listen, we examine the evidence, weigh it against our personal experiences and make a guess based on the balance of probabilities but we don’t know anything for sure. We accept the scientific consensus but that consensus has been wrong before.
My point then is that the “willfully blind,” as per the topic title, typically claim a confidence in their position to which their understanding of the subject gives them no right. Proving climate change requires decades of research and millions, if not billions of dollars; it is orders of magnitude easier to prove that the person you are talking to doesn’t know what they’re talking about. All I’m suggesting is to go after the low-hanging fruit.
As an example I had a friend tell me that he wasn’t sure about evolution, citing the eyeball as evidence. The eye is too perfectly designed, the lens is useless without a retina and the retina is useless without a lens, so how could they have evolved together by chance? I guess he heard the argument somewhere, because I’d read it myself in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The easy “win” is the nautilus, an animal with a retina but no lens, but if you just blurt that out you’re liable to get “ok, but what about the cuckoo’s tongue?” and other such goalpost-shifting. Better use can be made of the opportunity. I asked my friend a few questions, something like:
- Did you ask a biologist to explain how the eye evolved? No. We were at university so it’s not as unreasonable as it might sound.
- Did you read any books about evolution to try to find out how the eye might have evolved? No.
- Did you do any googling to try to find an explanation? No.
- Did you spend any time trying to think of optical imaging systems that work without a lens? Well, no…
- Are you in fact proposing that because you, personally, don’t see how an eye could have evolved then the entire theory of evolution is bunk?
Then we talked about pinhole cameras and the nautilus and Dawkins’ rather lovely explanation of how an eye can evolve stepwise, but instead of it being a conversation specifically about the eye it was instead a demonstration of what Dawkins calls the “argument from personal ignorance.” It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d then gone on to the cuckoo’s tongue or some other weird phenotype that I have no explanation for, because instead of eliminating one argument I was able to eliminate an entire class of arguments. It also made the point to my friend that if you want to hold a view outside the scientific consensus, you had better bloody well do your research.
Listen buddy, if you don’t want an argument you’re going the wrong way about it.
