The limits of critical thinking: climate skepticism, epistemic trespassing, and the understanding that grounds trust

Abstract

What should the public understand about climate change to form true beliefs and responsibly participate in democratic deliberation? We argue for a partly negative and partly positive answer. Negatively, the public does not need to understand the climate or first-order evidence in climate science: endeavors that pursue such first-order competence, such as mainstream critical thinking (CT) and logic-based inoculation strategies task non-experts with a demand they cannot reliably perform. We demonstrate this by applying such inoculation procedures to a sophisticated and credentialed argument against climate change, and show that encouraging non-experts to evaluate the first-order premises and scientific claims leads to epistemic trespassing. Positively, we argue that what the public actually needs for responsible participation in the climate debate is a more modest and attainable understanding of the social epistemology of science – understanding how the scientific consensus is formed and why the process is more reliable than the alternatives. This kind of understanding transforms blind reliance into rationally warranted trust. In doing so, we distinguish the process of higher-order critical assessment, the understanding it gives, and the calibrated deference it licenses, and we locate higher-order evidence on the side of warranted trust rather than first-order understanding. The result is an epistemically responsible framework for public engagement with climate science that redirects, rather than abandons, critical thinking.