Denialism - Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Anthropologist Didier Fassin distinguishes between denial, defined as "the empirical observation that reality and truth are being denied", and denialism, which he defines as "an ideological position whereby one systematically reacts by refusing reality and truth".

Individuals or groups who reject propositions on which a scientific or scholarly consensus exists can engage in denialism when they use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. Rick Stoff quotes Chris Hoofnagle, a senior staff attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, at the University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law:

Then there are those who engage in denialist tactics because they are protecting some 'overvalued idea' which is critical to their identity. Since legitimate dialogue is not a valid option for those who are interested in protecting bigoted or unreasonable ideas from scientific facts, their only recourse is to use these types of rhetorical tactics.

In a newspaper article in 2003 Edwin Cameron, a senior South African judge who had AIDS, described the tactics used by those who deny the Holocaust and those who deny that the AIDS pandemic is predominantly due to infection with HIV. He states that "For denialists, the facts are unacceptable. They engage in radical controversion, for ideological purposes, of facts that, by and large, are accepted by almost all experts and lay persons as having been established on the basis of overwhelming evidence". To do this they employ "distortions, half-truths, misrepresentation of their opponents' positions and expedient shifts of premises and logic." Edwin Cameron notes that a common tactic used by denialists is to "make great play of the inescapable indeterminacy of figures and statistics", as scientific studies of many areas rely on probability analysis of sets of data, and in historical studies the precise numbers of victims and other facts may not be available in the primary sources.

Such "recourse to data debates and pseudo-scientific 'evidence'" has also been noted as a common feature of several types of denialism in a 2009 article published in the journal Globalization and Health. This is an area which British historian Richard J. Evans mentioned as part of his analysis of the David Irving's work which he presented for the defence when Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel:

Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account, and, if necessary, amend their own case, accordingly. They do not present, as genuine, documents which they know to be forged just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious, but implausible, and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents, because these documents run counter to their arguments; again, they amend their arguments, if this is the case, or, indeed, abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources, which, in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability, or otherwise, simply because they want, for whatever reason, to maximize the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures, as impartially as possible, in order to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages in order to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not wilfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events, for which there is no historical evidence, in order to make their arguments more plausible.

Mark Hoofnagle has described denialism as "the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none." It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics in order to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy:

1. Conspiracy theories — Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in "a conspiracy to suppress the truth".
2. Cherry picking — Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers in order to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research.
3. False experts — Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility.
4. Moving the goalpost — Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence.
5. Other logical fallacies — Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring.

Tara Smith of the University of Iowa also stated that moving goalposts, conspiracy theories and cherry-picking evidence are general characteristics of denialist arguments, but went on to note that these groups spend the "majority of their efforts critiquing the mainstream theory" in an apparent belief that if they manage to discredit the mainstream view, their own "unproven ideas will fill the void".