Cover not available
Part of
Controversies and Interdisciplinarity: Beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model
Edited by Jens Allwood, Olga Pombo, Clara Renna and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 16] 2020
► pp. 75–94

Chapter 4
Cognitive science and the controversy of anthropogenic climate change

| Middle East Technical University
This paper takes a cognitive science perspective on the controversy of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) between deniers and advocates. It argues that cognitive science is a suitable framework due to its interdisciplinarity, experience with controversies, and appeal to meta-principles of cognition. From a Bayesian perspective, deniers seem to reason irrationally (belief polarization) and from an epistemic virtue ethics perspective act viciously. Yet, their behavior can be modelled as rational when taking the factor “worldview” into account and become virtuous in terms of “mandevillian intelligence” at the collective level. Insofar as deniers’ conservatism aims at stability but advocates’ liberalism at change, they jointly resolve the “stability-plasticity dilemma”. A number of outstanding questions are addressed at the end of the paper.
Keywords: anthropogenic climate change, Bayesian modeling, belief polarization, cognitive science, collective virtue ethics, complex societal problem, controversy, interdisciplinarity, mandevillian intelligence, virtues and vices
Article outline
  • Cognitive Science as a framework for the controversy of anthropogenic climate change (ACC)
  • ACC – a complex scientific problem on various spatio-temporal scales
  • ACC – a complex societal problem
  • The controversy of ACC
  • A mechanistic explanation of global warming
  • Belief polarization and ACC denial
  • (Collective) virtue epistemology and Mandevillian intelligence
  • Mechanisms of attaining collective epistemic virtues
  • Collective virtues of distrust, dogmatism, and cognitive bias
    • Distrust
    • Dogmatism
    • Cognitive bias
  • A cognitive meta-principle: The stability-plasticity dilemma
  • Convergence in the ACC controversy
  • The virtue and vice of levels (of argumentation)
  • Conclusion
  • Outstanding questions
    • Actual impact of an interdisciplinary perspective on ACC
    • The stability-plasticity dilemma in relation to society
    • Mandevillian intelligence
    • Boundary conditions of mandevillian intelligence
    • ACC and sustainable development
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.16.04hoh
References (63)
References
Abraham, W. C., & Robins, A. (2005). Memory retention – the synaptic stability versus plasticity dilemma. Trends in Neurosciences, 28(2), 73–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
American Psychological Association (2008). Society’s Grand Challenges: Insights from Psychological Science. Downloaded on Jan 20th 2019. Available online at: [URL]
(2011). Psychology & global climate change. Addressing a multifaceted phenomenon and a set of challenges. A report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface between Psychology and Global Climate Change (2011). Downloaded on Jan 20th 2019. Available online at: [URL]
Arrhenius, S. (1896). On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground. Philosophical Magazine, 41, 237–276.Google Scholar
Baars, B. J. (1986). The cognitive revolution in psychology. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Baron, J. (2006). Thinking about global warming. Climatic Change, 77, 137–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beer, R. (2000). Dynamical approaches to cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(3), 91–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bermúdez, J. (2020). Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind. 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buanes, A., & Jentoft, S. (2009). Building bridges: Institutional perspectives on interdisciplinarity. Futures, 41, 446–454. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayton, S. (Ed.). (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayton, S., & Myers, G. (2015). Conservation psychology: Understanding and promoting human care for nature. Second Edition. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Cook, J., & Lewandowsky, S. (2016). Rational irrationality: Modeling climate change belief polarization using Bayesian networks. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 160–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(3), 23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crutzen, P. J. & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The Anthropocene. IGBP Global Change Newsl., 41, 17–18.Google Scholar
de Tombe, D. (2015). Handling societal complexity. A study of the theory of the methodology of societal complexity and the COMPRAM methodology. Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
(2008). Climate change: a complex societal process; analysing a problem according to the Compram methodology. Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change, 5(3), 235–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elliott, A., Cullis, J., & Damodaran, V. (2017) (Eds.). Climate change and the humanities. Historical, philosophical and interdisciplinary approaches to the contemporary environmental crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.Google Scholar
Frigg, R., Thompson, E., & Werndl, C. (2015a). Philosophy of climate science part I: Observing climate change. Philosophy Compass, 10/12, 953–964. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015b). Philosophy of climate science part II: Modeling climate change. Philosophy Compass, 10/12, 965–977. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. (2010). Psychology in cognitive science: 1978–2038. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 328–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A. I. (2011). A guide to social epistemology. In A. I. Goldman, D. Whitcomb (Eds.), Social epistemology: Essential readings, (pp. 11–37). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Graffeo, M. (2017). Environmental psychology. Conflicting climate attitudes. Nature Climate Change, 7, 314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gray, W. (2016). Introduction to Volume 8, Issue 1 of topiCS. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 5–6. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grossberg, S. (1987). Competitive learning: From interactive activation to adaptive resonance. Cognitive Science, 11, 23–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hart, P. S., & Nisbet, E. C. (2011). Boomerang effects in science communication: How motivated reasoning and identity cues amplify opinion polarization about climate change mitigation policies. Communication Research, 39(6), 701–923. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change. Understanding controversy, interaction and opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
IPCC (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. Summary for Policymakers. Downloaded on Jan 20th 2019. Available online at [URL]
Jamieson, D. (2014). Reason in a dark time. Why the struggle against climate change failed – and what it means for our future. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaspal, R., Nerlich, B., & Cinnirella, M. (2014). Human responses to climate change: social representation, identity and action. Environmental Communication, 8(1), 110–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, N. (2011). Human influence comes of age, Nature, 473, 133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kassouf, S. (2017). Psychoanalysis and climate change: Revisiting Searles’s the nonhuman environment, rediscovering, Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy, and imagining a future. American Imago, 74(2), 141–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, G., Feltovich, P. J., Bradshaw, J. M., & Woods, D. D. (2005). Common ground and coordination in joint activity. In W. B. Rouse, & K. R. Boff (Eds.), Organizational simulation, (pp. 139–184). New York: John Wiley & Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lawson, R. (2014). Climate science & falsifiability. Philosophy Now, 104. [URL]
Leggewie, C., & Welzer, H. (2009). Das Ende der Welt, wie wir sie kannten. Klima, Zukunft und die Chancen der Demokratie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.Google Scholar
Lewandowsky, S. (2016). Future global change and cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 7–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mermillod, M., Bugaiska, A., & Bonin, P. (2013). The stability-plasticity dilemma: Investigating the continuum from catastrophic forgetting to age-limited learning effects. Front. Psychol., 4: 504. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Orange, D. (2017). Climate crisis, psychoanalysis, and radical ethics. New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.Google Scholar
Palermos, S. O. (2015). Active externalism, virtue reliabilism and scientific knowledge. Synthese, 192(9), 2955–2986. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ranney, M. A., & Clark, D. (2016). Climate change conceptual change: Scientific information can transform attitudes. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 49–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raworth, K. (2012). A safe and just space for humanity: Can we live within the doughnut? Oxfam Discussion Paper; available at [URL] Accessed on Jan 20th, 2019.
Robin, L. (2017). Environmental humanities and climate change: understanding humans geologically and other life forms ethically. WIREs Clim Change, e499. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siperstein, S., Hall, S., & LeMenager, S. (2016) (Eds.). Teaching climate change in the humanities. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smart, P. R. (2018a). Mandevillian intelligence. Synthese, 195(9), 4169–4200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2018b). Mandevillian intelligence: From individual vice to collective virtue. In A. J. Carter, A. Clark, J. Kallestrup, O. S. Palermos, & D. Pritchard, (Eds.), Socially Extended Epistemology (pp. 253–274). Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stainton, R. J. (Ed.). (2006). Contemporary debates in cognitive science. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Steffensen, S. V., & Fill, A. (2014). Ecolinguistics: the state of the art and future horizons. Language Sciences, 41, 6–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stern, P. C. (2000). Psychology and the science of human-environment interactions. American Psychologist, 55(5), 523–530. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steup, M. (2017). “Epistemology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <[URL]>.
Störqvist, P. (2016). Grand challenges in environmental psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:583. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thagard, P. (2014). “Cognitive Science”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <[URL]>.
(2005). Mind. An introduction to cognitive science. 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Thagard, P., & Findlay, S. (2012). Changing minds about climate change: Belief revision, coherence, and emotion. In P. Thagard (Ed.), The cognitive science of science. Explanation, discovery, and conceptual change (pp. 61–80). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
UN (2017). The sustainable development goals report. United Nations publication issued by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). [URL]
Vandenberg, P., & DeHart, A. (2013). Mandeville, Bernard. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Downloaded on Jan 20th, 2019: [URL]
van der Linden, S., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2015). Improving public engagement with climate change: Five “best practice” insights from psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10 (6), 758–763. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Welzer, H. (2008). Klimakriege. Wofür im 21. Jahrhundert getötet wird. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer.Google Scholar
Werndl, C. (2016). On defining climate and climate change. Brit. J. Phil. Sci., 67, 337–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zalasiewicz, J., et al. (2008). Are we now living in the Anthropocene? GSA Today, 18(2), 4–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zollman, K. J. S. (2010). The epistemic benefit of transient diversity. Erkenntnis, 72(1), 17–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar