What do philosophers bring to the climate discussion?

Last month, at the invitation of the Portland Center for Public Humanities, I joined an interview with Dale Jamieson, professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University. He spoke on the role of philosophers in climate discussions.

One thing philosophers bring to the table is a willingness to discuss values in a reflective way. I think, increasingly, as the climate change issue evolves, it becomes a much more widely shared perspective that this is fundamentally a value-driven problem, and we’re not going to be able to deal with it until we begin to approach it in that way.

Traditionally, scientists – particularly social scientists – have not been very much at home in talking about value issues or value commitments. But yet, if you try to bracket those issues or put them under the table, it’s like the lump under the carpet: It’s still there, doing its work. But we’re not really addressing those issues.

Another set of issues that I think philosophers can bring to the discussion concern epistemology, or how we know what we know. The climate change issue presents really interesting questions: what knowledge consists in; what we mean when we talk about uncertainty; what the relationship is between knowledge and certainty and action. These are issues, in new forms, that are instances of old issues that philosophers have been concerned with for a very long time.

And then a third area – which I think is related to the second area – is that, part of why people have trouble, I think, responding to the science of climate change is that the science is very different from what we were taught science is supposed to be, in the first chapter of most science textbooks. Most of us were taught that: scientists go out; they make observations; they form theories; then they see whether those theories are confirmed or falsified; they revise the theories; and so on and so forth. When it comes to climate change, what we have are people living in basements, surrounded by supercomputers, building models of – essentially – the planetary system. And they won’t even call the outputs of these models predictions. They’ll call them scenarios. Maybe on a day when they’re feeling wild and wooly, they’ll call them forecasts. A lot of this is very good science and extremely important science – but it doesn’t feel much like the kind of science that most of us were raised upon. And I think that raises interesting issues in the philosophy of science, and I think that philosophers can play an important role is trying to interpret that kind of science.
 

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