When the facts alone don’t change people’s minds, and even presenting them in a favourable light is not likely to be effective, what else are we left with? We could try the following:
1) Giving people the right analogy, metaphor, figure of speech (another of Lakoff’s brain children). True, analogies and their relatives are often used in explaining things to people to try to make them understand, and scientific language is certainly full of what appear to be analogies. I could say that a gas behaves as if it were a collection of hard balls bouncing off one another, and could derive Boyle’s Law from such a consideration. The only problem is that at some point all analogies break down: A molecule in the gas state is not a hard ball, even if it acts like one for the purposes of Boyle’s Law. If all our understanding rests on analogies that according to Lakoff derive from direct experience, then knowledge would have a much harder time increasing than it already has, as it would be limited by the number of analogies we start off with. There is a feeling that understanding something involves more than simply understanding an apt analogy for it. In fact when a scientific concept, which originally relied on analogy, has advanced, then the original analogy may have persevered in the language, but not in the concept. Few people today can say what the word “electricity” originally meant, and they certainly mean something different when they talk about charging up a phone, than what was meant with that same word in Lichtenberg’s and Faraday’s day. “Electricity” is derived from the Greek word for amber, and when amber was rubbed against wool, the materials became “charged” or loaded with the elusive quality of “electricity”. Today, we know better: Electrons are transferred from one substance to another.
2) Making something really simple. A few years ago the NCSE, which supports the teaching of evolution in the USA, decided that evolution could be summarised as, “Change over time.” Unfortunately calling evolution, “Change over time” doesn’t help people understand evolution, on the contrary, it simply becomes a slogan for believers to exchange with non-believers. Simplification per se, and oversimplification even more, result in a loss of information to the point where understanding becomes impaired. Much as I respect Eugenie Scott and the work she has done to promote evolution, reducing a complex idea to a sound bite is dumbing it down.
3) Science as the current expert consensus. Again, don’t get me wrong, this time about the science of climate change, but presenting it as the consensus of the scientists concerned is little more that an appeal to authority, and does not absolve the scientists from explaining to the rest of us how the science is meant to work. I don’t care if the consensus is 97% or 99.9%, if you can’t explain it to me so that I can understand, then I am not going to understand it and take appropriate action. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population is not climate scientists and if they don’t understand it, nor will they act appropriately. Ninety-nine percent of climate scientists is a miniscule proportion of the world’s population, even if what they have to say is vital to the rest of us.
4) A further possibility for winning people over to the skeptics’ side might be the hard sell, persuasion and convincing, pulling all the stops, emotional, authoritative, being the nice guy, and so on, only I suspect that most scientists would reject these approaches as being irrelevant, although they might be hard pushed to say why, or they might be uncomfortable in the role of try to sell someone an idea that they themselves may not be certain about. For me the concept of persuasion, which in German is Überzeugen, involves going above and beyond what can be asserted as factual, something that scientists should be wary of.
What happens when you go to a scientific conference? Well, it is usually not a very edifying event, perhaps 90% of the presentations involve Powerpoint slides that are filled to the brim with everything the audience has to know, but which no one – least of all the presenter – has time to go into in any detail, and which remains for most of the audience completely illegible. Presentations like this leave little mark on the audience, which may be deep in slumber to compensate for the previous evening’s grand dinner in any case. But there will be a small number of presentations which do leave a mark, and to understand why they do will give us some insight into the problem of trying to get people to accept the skeptical point of view.
