Concept: Around the Unsound

I got the idea for this blog by tossing around ideas in my head. Which, if you've never met me, you know that I don't always make sense when I'm in this process. Heck, you might be able to tell that from my two earlier posts. In any case, I was trying to think through the way I was considering my target population. The common labels are:

• Climate Change Deniers
• Climate Skeptics
• Climate Realists

Attached to these words are other problematic associations that I view as a threat to the validity of my research. This speaks more to the way language is used colloquially and the manner by which these assumptions become stereotype which can become prejudice. We put work into the labels that I mentioned, but there is also the brain to consider.

Heuristics, in the sense that I mean them, are a short cut to cognitive processing that is in line with evolutionary theory. Imagine you’re in the body of your great great great great great great…great great…super great grandparent in a mixed forest grassland. You aren’t alone. Sure, you may have some family close by, but there are also predators. In order to survive, you need to be able to make snap decisions and plan for the future. The various heuristic devices and cognitive streamlining facilitates these processes.

For more information on heuristics, I’d refer you to the pioneering work of Tversky and Kahneman. Which, if no one has yet, someone needs to write about the intersections between this information and that of the development of racism. Other suggested reading on this topic has to do with the types of attribution errors. The most common is probably the fundamental attribution errors. These are all empirically measurable biological processes that enable critters like us with our big brains to by-pass frontal cortex processing: critical thinking. Consider that if we actively attended to everything all the time, the world would be overstimulating to the extreme.

So, when I say I'm studying climate change denial, your brain skips to thinking they’re probably:

• … alt-right or at least conservative.
• … uneducated and ignorant.
• … follow a fundamentalist religion.

Now, you may draw other conclusions based on your experience, because that’s what your brain is supposed to do. With these assumptions about people, you’re not exactly wrong, but you’re not completely correct. Part of having these conversations and thinking through these thoughts is to challenge our bias and find ways to have productive conversations. I’m not sure I’m doing well at that since I just told you that the way you’ve streamlined thinking about people is wrong…but, you’re in my blog, not a peer reviewed journal.

My issue with these labels is that they don’t capture the range of human variation. They apply a type of sense to the world, more for the benefit of our peace of mind as opposed to a desire for poking around at getting objective truth. I am supposed to be pursuing the latter, so I cannot use establish labels without taking a fuck load of societal baggage with me. This leaves me in the unenviable position of needing to talk around these otherwise unfounded and unsound assumptions.

Around the Unsound?

The fun part of this, for me, is that I had a moment where a few things clicked into place. I need to be the person that is able to move between, though, and around these extremes to find the patterns. The patterns support a way of knowing the world at that particular place during that particular time. Sure, there are some phenomenological implications, but I’m not quite there yet with my Summer reading. For now, I’ve conceptualized myself as needing to embody this developing idea about how to see around the unsound things that exist when we reduce any conversation to a binary opposition.