New Articles

I've had a number of (non-academic) articles published recently:

'Dwellers and Seekers' in the latest issue of The Jewish Quarterly (Autumn 2007, 60-1)

 'The Seductions of Denial' on the Open Democracy  website (September 13 2007)

'Boycotts and Ethics' on the Jeneration website (23 August 2007)

‘A Response to Ruth Rosenfelder’ [part  of the collection ‘The Problem With Dialogue’] on the New Jewish Thought website (September 2007)

'Listening to Jews' [an essay review of Les Back's 'The Art of Listening'] on the New Jewish Thought website (September 2007)

Comments

[Jack Zaientz]

Hi Keith, I just read your piece on denial. It's definitely thought provoking, but I have don't think I quite agree with some of your points (or maybe I'm just misunderstanding them). I feel that there is conflation of ontology with epistemology in your article. You describe 'denial' in a way that suggets its a category of belief, (this set of people is denying) and note some psychological factors why 'denial' exists. But even if there is a psychological impulse to deny, that doesn't adequately separate deniers from scientists (your strawmen) without applying brain scanners to all deniers. Do you know that all HIV deniers are actually experiencing psychological denial? I was hoping you'd describe a consistent epistemology of denial. Post enlightenment (and post-positivist) science is a particular epistemological process that requires first the inference of principles from facts and then the testing of predictions made by those principles in a manner that is open and repeatable and where results are testable. Refuting scientific statements is a central part of that epistemology. What is different about denial? Is denial just psychologically motivated bad science, where scientific process is asserted but not adequately followed? Or is it something more? Is there a particular process that deniers use that is internally consistent? Are there a class of arguments that can logically justify denial?

(whoof. I'll turn off 'scientist mode' now. Thanks for the article. Like I said. Thought provoking.)

[Keith Kahn-Harris]

Thanks for the comment - very thought-provoking. My article is intended to be the start of a process of thinking about and researching denial so I don't have answers to all your questions! However, my thinking at the moment is to differentiate denial (with a small 'd') and Denial (with a capital 'D'). The former refers to psychological processes of seld-deception and the latter to a particular form of scholarship and argument. It is the latter that I am interested in and the former that I am trying to bracket out of consideration for the moment. I am trying to avoid (ultimately fruitless) questions such as 'do they believe it?' or 'are they lying to themselves?' by concentrating on denial as a form of discourse.
It's a provisional solution though...

[Jack Zaientz]

Hi Keith. Sounds great. I'm looking forward to your next article, then. I agree with the idea of bracketing out the psychological side and am interested in where you're going to go with discourse. I'm not up on discourse theory, but I'm guessing you're interested in the deliberate use of denial as part a larger rhetorical process. E.g. "You have made a point, and this point has certain implications that I disagree with, so I will deny your original point to remove support for the implications." Something like that?

That sounds interesting. The thing that would make such an argument really compelling (for me at least) was if you could describe internally consistent, logically sound, tactics for denial. I heard a political theorist do this recently with post-hoc analysis of political judgement. He presented four logical arguments that politicians can use to logically defend even the worst political judgment (e.g. "my action may be perceived to have caused a bad outcome, but had I not acted the outcome would have been worse") I can't remember the name of the theorist but I might be able to find out if you were interested.

Anyway, along those lines, here are a couple of stabs at denial tactics. What to you think?

- Deliberate conflation of logical/ mathematical proof and scientific evidence. Unlike formal mathematics and logic, science does not work in closed systems. Thus it based on falsifiability not proveability. Non-scientists (and some scientists) mess this up though and talk about scientific proof when they should be talking about evidence. With such confusion in terms and process, deniers can point to the the scientist's inability to "prove" something as a flaw in that scientists argument.

- Deliberate conflation of different meanings of "theory" - in science, "theory" has a specific meaning and is embedded in the process of infer, predict, test process. In common English "theory" is often used to mean any idea, hunch, or model. Deniers can present their a-scientific (unsupported or untestable) idea as "theory" right beside a scientific "theory" without their audience understanding that the two are not the same thing.

- Challenging foundational (and untestable) scientific assumptions. Contemporary science has a number of built-in assumption that can be rejected by a denier. For example, science (generally) assumes that the current physical laws have always been in place such that continuous historic (geological, evolutionary, cosmological) processes can be inferred from current observations. A denier can reject this assumption as speculative and assert discrete historic process concepts such as God placing fossils in the ground.

[Keith Kahn-Harris]

Thanks again for your comments Jack

The task of identifying denial tactics is a really important one. In the book I want to write, 'how to spot a denier' will be the most important chapter. I have some ideas about this but they are too fluid as yet to be worth sharing.

However, I am not the first person to think along these lines. I've found quite a few attempts to classify denier tactics as these examples illustrate:

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/05/evolution-denial-holocaust-denial-same.html
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962462

Your three denial tactics are on the money. The one about 'theory' is central and has been talked about before.