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April 18, 2007
Science Skeptics?
by Sylvia S Tognetti
I have not yet had time to wade through all of the heated discussion sparked by Chris Mooney's and Matthew Nisbet's articles on Framing Science (article links are in the side-bar, for a round-up of discussion links see Coturnix), much less weigh in on it. I probably will. Not like I haven't written about the subject before. For now, I just want to call attention to perhaps a new way to frame the so-called climate skeptics. It may have been inadvertent or subconscious but, in this PBS Frontline interview with the infamous Frank Luntz, the interviewer refers to skeptics - not of climate, but of science. That sounds about right! If one rejects a consensus shared by all major scientific bodies, one is rejecting not the science of climate change, but the process of science as a way of knowing anything. In other words, the "science" frame is used deceptively, as a fig leaf for value conflicts.
[unfortunately, the video was removed from YouTube but the Frontline show, Hot Politics, airs next Sunday the 24th at 9 pm]
I found this via a link on the DeSmogBlog in a post by Kevin Grandia, who only calls attention to Luntz' admission of having changed his beliefs since writing the infamous memo. In that memo, Luntz essentially advocated a deceptive use of the uncertainty frame. As for that, here is a relevant excerpt from my earlier post about framing:
What concerns me even more is the use of familiar frames and nice-sounding concepts, like sound science, data quality, CO2 is life or intelligent design to manipulate and deceive. (For more commentary on the CO2 is life ads put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, see posts by the usual suspects: RealClimate, Tim Lambert, Chris Mooney.)
This can make it difficult or impossible to talk about some important ideas that fit almost too well into a grossly distorted and misleading narrative. For example, any talk about uncertainties in climate science inevitably gets distorted by the likes of Benny Peiser who
doesn'tpretends not to know the difference between uncertainty of the magnitude and significance of climate change, and uncertainty regarding policies to address climate change, and whose debunked study nevertheless continues to be cited by denialists of human-induced global warming. And then we wind up with confused scientists blaming social theory altogether, rather than the misuse of it by those who seek to discredit the science that provides justification for environmental and other policies that protect public safety and health, and that have broad public support. Odd that they don't blame Einstein for the atomic bomb, or Darwin for policies of Social Darwinism. Nor was Machiavelli a Machiavellian. More constructive than attacking social theory would be to provide some transparency to its misuse for purposes of social manipulation. So I'll wrap this up with a quote from Erving Goffman's book on Frame Analysis (1974) where he refers to the work of Gregory Bateson, who began to talk about framing in a paper first presented in 1954:The very useful paper by Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Phantasy," in which he directly raised the question of unseriousness and seriousness, allowing us to see what a startling thing experience is, such that a bit of serious activity can be used as a model for putting together unserious versions of the same activity, and that, on occasion, we may not know whether it is play or the real thing that is occurring. (Bateson introduced... also the argument that individuals can intentionally produce framing confusion in those with whom they are dealing...
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at April 18, 2007 9:39 PM
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