Denialism - Prescriptive and Polemic

Prescriptive and Polemic

If one party to a debate accuses the other of denialism they are framing the debate, because denialism is prescriptive: it carries implications that there is a truth that the other side denies, and polemic because the accuser usually goes on to explain how the other party is denying the asserted truth and as such the other party is in the wrong, which leads to an implied accusation that if the accused party persist with the denial despite the evidence their motives must be base.

Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University, has suggested that this is a new use for the word denial and it may have its origins in an old sense of "deny", akin to "disown", (as in the Apostle Peter denying Christ), but that its more immediate antecedence is from the Freudian sense of deny as a refusal to accept a painful or humiliating truth. He writes that "An accusation of 'denial' is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness." He suggests that, by the introduction of the denier tag into further areas of historical and scientific debate, "One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed", and that this should worry liberal-minded people.