Enquiry and normative deviance: The role of fake news in science denialism

Our main thesis is that science denialism brings about an aberrant form of enquiry—that we shall call post-enquiry—in which the epistemic norms governing scientific enquiry are deviated in significant ways." Science denialism doesn’t merely involve a rejection of a scientific theory—otherwise scientists themselves would count as science deniers given that they would reject theories on the basis of their explanatorily inadequacy. Rather, science denialism deeply challenges the practice, common within scientific enquiry, of continuously and, to a certain extent, impartially testing research methods, theories, and evidential sources with the aim of improving the accuracy of scientific theories. In this sense, science denialism brings about a radical deviation of the norms governing the practice of scienti!c enquiry—a deviation which gives rise to what we shall call a normative aberration. We offer an in-depth analysis of the epistemic mechanisms underpinning the normative aberration brought about by science denialism. More specifically, we develop a fine-grained framework to model a variety of normative deviances that can take place in enquiry. In doing so, we focus especially on the kind of normative deviances related to science denialism and, by analysing two case studies, we argue that fake news contributes significantly to shape the epistemic norms operating within science denialism. They in fact play two pivotal roles: first, they are used to cast discredit on a variety of (institutional) sources of evidence in relation to a certain set of phenomena (e.g. whether vaccines are safe); second, they also play a part in building the alternative explanation of the targeted phenomena. This chapter is structured as follows. In Section 2, we characterize enquiry by developing a model of epistemic normativity. In Section 3, we introduce the notions of background assumptions and epistemic filters. In Section 4, we provide two criteria for assessing the good-standing of an enquiry. In Section 5, we illustrate some varieties of normative deviance. In Sections 6 and 7, we discuss two examples of science denialism arguing that they are instances of a speci!c kind of normatively aberrant enquiry, namely a post-enquiry.