How can the ideas and concepts in qset all concatenated help address the issue of contested science around the cause of global warming
The ideas and concepts in qset:all concatenated provide a rigorous framework for addressing contested science—such as the causes of global warming—not by attempting to declare a single “winner” in the debate, but by restructuring how we understand complexity, causality, and the role of the observer.
1. Reframing the Issue as a “Wicked Problem”
Systems thinkers classify global warming not as a simple “puzzle” with a single technical solution, but as a wicked problem or “mess”.
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Non-Separability: In a mess, every problem is tightly interconnected with others; attempting to solve the “cause” of global warming in isolation from economic, political, and cultural systems often intensifies the overall difficulty.
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No Stopping Rule: Unlike scientific “tame” problems, wicked problems have no definitive formulation and the “solving” process is never truly finished; we only achieve resolutions that are “better or worse,” not “true or false”.
2. Shifting from “Truth” to “Mental Models”
A central theme is that all scientific knowledge is based on models, not absolute reality.
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Observer Centrality: “Anything said is said by an observer”. Different stakeholders notice different “facts” based on their appreciative settings—the internal filters conditioned by their values and history.
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Exposing Assumptions: To address contested science, Donella Meadows advises making unspoken assumptions explicit. By getting a model “out there where it can be shot at,” parties can move from attacking each other to testing the logical consistency of their combined assumptions.
3. Overcoming Cognitive Barriers to “Systemic Causation”
George Lakoff’s work explains why the cause of global warming is cognitively “contested”:
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Direct vs. Systemic Causation: The human brain is evolutionarily wired for direct causation (an agent applying force to a patient, like “the boy broke the window”).
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Cognitive Blindness: Global warming involves systemic causation—diffuse, indirect, and probabilistic chains of cause and effect. Because this doesn’t fit the standard “direct causation” frame, many people reject the science simply because their brains cannot process the logic automatically.
4. Methodologies for Managing Conflict
Rather than forcing a consensus that suppresses minority views, several methodologies are proposed to utilize the conflict:
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Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST): This identifies stakeholders and surfaces the hidden beliefs driving their positions. By plotting these assumptions on an Importance/Certainty matrix, a group can focus on the most critical points of disagreement.
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Hegelian Dialectic: Ian Mitroff suggests a structured debate where two opposing sides (e.g., anthropogenic vs. natural cause) must argue their case using the exact same data. This forces them to realize their conflict is not about the numbers, but about the underlying assumptions used to interpret them.
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Accommodation over Consensus: The goal is often “accommodation”—finding a path forward that parties with conflicting worldviews can “live with,” even if they do not agree on the underlying values.
5. Managing Uncertainty via Probes
In complex systems, causality is often only visible in retrospect.
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Safe-to-Fail Experiments: Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework suggests that in complex domains, experts cannot provide a definitive answer in advance. Instead, the approach should be Probe-Sense-Respond: launch small, parallel, and even contradictory experiments to see how the system actually reacts, allowing a more effective practice to emerge.
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Embracing Errors: Instead of feigning certainty, practitioners should adopt a posture of “error-embracing,” using surprises and anomalies as vital information to update their models.
6. Challenging the “Environmental Fallacy”
Contested science often arises from drawing boundaries too narrowly.
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The Environmental Fallacy: This occurs when a problem is defined in a way that ignores its impact on the broader environment (e.g., focusing solely on carbon emissions while ignoring economic impacts, or vice-versa).
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“Sweeping In”: Churchman’s Singerian approach demands continuously “sweeping in” new variables—including ethics, politics, and the perspectives of future generations—to ensure that a “precise” solution to the wrong problem isn’t adopted.